LA police flooded with 911 calls – because Facebook was down

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was forced to send out a Twitter message asking panicking citizens to stop calling 911 because Facebook was down.

The wonderfully-named Sgt Burton Brink tweeted on Friday: ‘#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!’

Nervous residents – fearing that they had been permanently cut off from the world of cat memes and pictures of friends’ meals – had been choking 911 and the regular police number throughout the afteoon.

#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! — Sgt. Brink (@LASDBrink) August 1, 2014

The site had gone down around midday local time, and users were met with the horrifying: ‘Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.’

Despite the fact that order was restored around an hour later, it was already 59 minutes and 59.5 seconds too long for inconsolable networkers, who by that time had 911 on speed dial.

Fast-thinking Sgt Brink fired off his tweet at 5.37pm – narrowly avoiding a post-work surge – otherwise he might still be going through 911 messages now.