Officers pleased be advised, the complainant says his Facebook account is down and he's on the verge of spending the afternoon on Twitter and possibly even Google Plus -- that's what a 911 call to the LA County Sheriff's Office may or may not have been like after Facebook suffered a brief disruption, as a captain from the law enforcement agency says the sergeant who reported the Facebook 911 calls wasn't even on duty around the time of the outage.
For just a few minutes, Facebook users were greeted with the chilling "something went wrong" message. The generic nature of outage notification always makes it unclear how long the social networking site will be down, and so several panicked users called the LA County Sheriff's Office for assistance with the matter, according to a Twitter message posted by Sgt. Burton Brink of the law enforcement agency's Crescenta Valley Station.
"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," stated Brink.
To clear up any ambiguity in his previous message, the sheriff's officer stated that his agency had, in fact, received multiple calls with regards to the Facebook outage.
"Yes we got calls #facebookdown, that is why I sent out my previous msg to prevent them. Unk number received on 911 or reg number TY #LASD," stated Brink.
Capt. Britta Steinbrenner, of the LA County Sheriff's Office's Information Bureau, contradicted Brink's statements about the outage.
Steinbrenner said the Information Bureau had no knowledge of any 911 calls related to the Facebook outage and said Brink wasn't on duty when he posted the Twitter messages, which were tweeted shortly after Zucky's social networking site went down for undisclosed reasons. The sheriff's office was launching an investigation into Brink's statements, Steinbrenner said.
Facebook has kept the probe into its most recent outage private, but an anonymous source indicated that "suspicious activity" has been all but ruled out. Everything indicated that the outage was merely a technical issue, the source stated.
Facebook released a statement via email, apologizing for the brief disruption of service.
"Earlier this morning, some people had trouble accessing Facebook for a short time. We quickly investigated and have fully restored service for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience," stated Facebook.
Just a month earlier, Facebook encountered another outage. The June 19 outage was of similar magnitude to the Aug. 1, both of which paled in comparison to the 2.5-hour-long service disruption in 2010.
