Society & Politics

Does todays generation consider this a Life Threatening Emergency?


Example: [Collected via Facebook, August 2014]

Heard on a radio talk show this morning that Facebook was down somewhere in Cali for about 19 minutes... people were calling 911. The PD went on Twitter and told everyone that FB was not a police issue and not to call anymore. I'm worried about out country; very worried.

Origins: During the morning of 1 August 2014, service to Facebook was disrupted, rendering the social media network unreachable for some and painfully slow to operate for others. The company responded to the outage by issuing a statement saying "Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We'll update shortly." Service was restored about 30 minutes later.

However, even that short disruption supposedly proved too much for some Facebook users. Sgt. Burton Brink, the spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Crescenta Valley Station, tweeted that:

Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up!

yes, we get calls all the time like this, cable TV, all sorts of things not working, they think we control.


citizens certainly have placed similar 911 calls about other non-emergency matters. During the summer of 2013, residents of a Connecticut town called 911 when a cable outage interrupted viewing of the popular television show Breaking Bad. In 2005, one irate consumer purportedly called 911 to report that her fast food burger hadn't been prepared to her liking and to demand that the police do something about it. The Los Angeles Police Department estimates that 70% of calls to 911 in the first half of 2014 have been non-emergency calls, including one from a man who called to complain that he hadn't gotten cheese on his hamburger.

Does todays generation consider this a Life Threatening Emergency?
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