Saturday, August 02, 2014

Why I despair for America: "LA Residents Call 911 Over Facebook Outage"


Does missing your friend's latest baby picture constitute an emergency?  For some Los Angeles residents who reportedly called 911 to report that Facebook was down briefly on Friday, the answer is apparently yes.

Facebook was not accessible for a short time during "a widespread outage that affected users in multiple countries," according to Reuters.  Service was restored fully and the outage was being blamed on "a technical' failure rather than any suspicious activity," the news agency cited an unnamed source as saying.

But before all Facebook users were able to access the site again, some LA-area Facebookers seems to have thought the interruption of their social networking fix was worthy of a call to emergency dispatch, the Los Angeles Times reported:

At 9:37 a.m. Pacific, Sgt. Burton Brink, public information officer for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Crescenta Valley Station, tweeted a stern reprimand to Facebook junkies who were apparently tying up the 911 lines with cries for help.

Sgt. Brink later indicated that the calls to 911 about Facebook being down weren't just from one individual but appeared to have come from multiple social media junkies, though he didn't name the number of calls received.
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....   (Still shaking head) ....

How does one even begin to comment on a news item like that or what it says about our society?


2 comments:

Undergroundpewster said...

This proves the theory of devolution: simpler creatures devolve from more complex creatures as the result of environmental pressures.

Undergroundpewster said...

If you think that is cause for despair, how about the latest rage of setting oneself on fire for a second or two then jumping in a pool? http://www.indystar.com/story/life/2014/07/31/fishers-warns-teens-of-social-media-challenge-pour-alcohol-on-body-light-it/13394753/