Facebook is currently in the middle of its biggest outage in history but no one has made the audacious move to call police about it… yet.
Reports surfaced on both television and in print that police and emergency services were asking the public not to contact them about the issue. Here’s Channel 7’s ‘Sunrise’ doing just that:
Emergency services are asking the public to stop calling triple zero about the Facebook and Instagram outage 😐 pic.twitter.com/ZHlGr1uQAt
— Sunrise (@sunriseon7) March 13, 2019
The outage has been an issue since 3am AEDT, but police contacted by PEDESTRIAN.TV all confirmed that they hadn’t received any calls and that maybe, just maybe, a few online jokes had been taken a bit too far.
NSW Police said it was not an issue that had been brought to its attention, while Queensland Police said they hadn’t received calls either, though they said they had received spurious calls in the past:
In the past we have had people call 000 to say, for example, that their pizza had been delivered cold and once we had a call asking what time ‘Blue Heelers’ was on TV. So unfortunately we do see many instances of people calling us to report outrageous things like this.
It is possible that the media were confusing the Facebook outages with the Gmail stuff-up yesterday. The Queensland Police spokesperson said they were “puzzled as to what tweet or post ‘Sunrise’ was referring to this morning about Instagram,” but did link to a tweet from Wednesday morning about Gmail.
Meanwhile across the ditch New Zealand’s Canterbury Police said it hadn’t received any calls from people about the outage and said it was likely that others had just been responding to a post made “in jest” on Twitter earlier on Thursday.
https://twitter.com/NZPCanterbury/status/1105889975713718273
South Australia’s Emergency Service even responded to Sunrise’s report, asking people not to contact them about the outage.
We know Facebook & Instagram are down. Please don’t call triple zero to let us know. https://t.co/WBXmCsn11g
— SASES (@SA_SES) March 13, 2019
As of Thursday afternoon Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger were all still screwing people, so while the police aren’t on the case just yet – nor should they be – maybe you can take the opportunity to take a deep breath and head outside.
Or just go on Twitter.
