People were calling the police because Instagram and Facebook were down Emergency services in the USA and Australia have had to request that internet users stop phoning 911 and Australian equivalent, 000, to report that Facebook and Instagram were down. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, had possibly its most widespread outage on March 13 \u2013 14, with users unable to access or load either website all around the world. Facebook acknowledged the issues, and assured users that they were not caused by a malicious DDoS, in a post on Twitter \u2013 the only social network which appeared to survive the crash, as it\u2019s not part of Facebook\u2019s \u2018family of apps\u2019. We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack. \u2014 Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019 With Facebook and Instagram among the most visited sites in the world, behind only the likes of YouTube and Google, the news of mass outages quickly spread \u2013 but some users\u2019 panic went slightly too far. Australian news show \u2018Sunrise\u2019 reported that \u201cQueensland police are saying please don\u2019t call 000 \u2013 I know\u2026\u201d Emergency services are asking the public to stop calling triple zero about the Facebook and Instagram outage :neutral_face: pic.twitter.com\/ZHlGr1uQAt \u2014 Sunrise (@sunriseon7) March 13, 2019 Canterbury Police in New Zealand also had to make a plea on Twitter to stop residents phoning to report Facebook outages. We know. Our @facebook and @instagram haven\u2019t been working either. Unfortunately we cannot do anything about this because, you know, they\u2019re based in America and we\u2019re the Police. So please don\u2019t call us to report this. Pretty please. \u2014 Canterbury Police NZ (@NZPCanterbury) March 13, 2019 It wasn\u2019t just Queensland and New Zealand residents either, as there were also reports of calls being made to 911 in California, and other places in the US. Police in Bothell, Washington had to make a similar plea on their Twitter account. We will move mountains to help those in our community, however we can’t fix Facebook so please don’t call 911 to “”let us know its down.”” pic.twitter.com\/6K5C2s3Vsk \u2014 Bothell Police (@BothellPolice) October 11, 2017 It should go without saying that phoning law enforcement to inform them of a website outage is a serious waste of police time. Facebook and Instagram has been coming back online for most users on March 14, but it appears it\u2019s not completely out of the woods yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People were calling the police because Instagram and Facebook were down Emergency services in the USA and Australia have had to request that internet users stop phoning 911 and Australian equivalent, 000, to report that Facebook and Instagram were down. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, had possibly its most widespread outage on March 13 \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}