Facebook Outage Stirred Emergency Calls to 911

If you are a regular user of facebook, then you also might have witnessed a short outage of facebook on 2nd August 2014. This outage definitely created an outrage from the facebook addicts all over the world. This might be unbelievable but 911 actually received few calls from people asking the police to bring back the facebook online. It is really funny to say that some people might assume that facebook shutdowns are someway related to law enforcement agencies and sheriffs can play some part in bring back internet websites back online.

The Friday outage of Facebook lasted for about half an hour, and the number of calls made to 911 emergency helpline clearly depicts how people have got themselves addicted to social networking sites especially facebook and they cannot tolerate its outage for even thirty minutes. LA County Sheriff’s office was one of the law enforcement agencies of USA that received phone calls from citizens regarding facebook outage. These calls were so irritating that the office has to tweet on twitter that their force has nothing to do with this outage and they does not handle such interruptions. Sergeant Burton Brink tweeted that Facebook is not a issue of law enforcement, please don’t call police for it being down, and we don’t know when it will be back online.
As the news of facebook outage was not enough, this tweet of sergeant and the news that people are calling 911 for doing something regarding it totally thwarted the residents of that area. Some people started to tweet regarding this event and someone even tweeted that brains are on vacation as people are calling 911 to bring back facebook. This outage of facebook impacted its users worldwide, and facebook was quick enough to issue an apology to its users over the service interruption.
Facebook stated that in the early morning of 2nd August, some people had trouble in accessing facebook for a very short period. Facebook immediately responded and have fully restored the service for all of its users around the word. Facebook also stated that they are sorry for inconvenience. Facebook is the largest social networking website of the world with 1.32 billion users reaching all the corners of world. Facebook has not spoken about the cause of this outage and only mentioned that it was due to a technical failure. This global outage was second in just two months.
As the popularity is very obvious as can be seen by its growth, not everyone is a great fan of facebook. As reported by Tech Time, LinkedIn and Facebook were on very low scores in the very recent American Customer Satisfaction Index. The main reasons behind this low score were data security and privacy issues. Facebook has been rolling out many new features and tools to lure more people towards facebook and to bring back those who have lost their interest. We will have to wait and see what is going to be impact of these outages on facebook user engagement.