The Police Do Not Care That Facebook Is Down: Stop Calling

Maybe we need to stop writing about the instances where you are not supposed to call emergency services, and instead we should make a list of the times when you are supposed to dial 9-1-1. For example, if you are in imminent danger. If your house is on fire. If someone nearby is having a life-threatening health problem. When you should not dial 9-1-1: Facebook is down.

We understand that you just have to talk to someone about it. Heck, we even felt the need to post when the site was out intermittently on Friday. However, we did not pick up the phone, partly because talking to real humans is terrifying, and partly because a social media outage is not a situation that the police should address.

Apparently, that did not stop people in the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where Public Information Officer Burton Brink does not want to hear about your Facebook outage.

Yes, he clarified later: this is a thing that really happened.

The LASD is not to be confused with the Los Angeles Police Department, covering the city of Los Angeles, which reports that it did not receive any 911 calls about the Facebook outage.

LA residents call 911 when Facebook goes down [CNN]

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