Facebook down: Don’t ring us when site stops working, say police

Forces urge users to spend time with their families instead

Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 29 September 2015 15:43 BST
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Facebook went down for the second time in a week on Monday night.
Facebook went down for the second time in a week on Monday night. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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Various police forces have urged people not to call them when Facebook goes down, as it has a number of times in recent weeks.

The site often causes turmoil across the internet when it collapses, since it is visited so often and relied on so many. But the police have warned that they’re not in a position to do anything about that chaos.

Forces joined in a trend of disapproving tweets when Facebook went down last night. The police in Kingston told people to spend some time with their families, while the Houston police said that they were “as upset as you are but we cannot fix facebook”.

Neither of the police forces indicated that they had actually received calls about the fact that Facebook was broken. But last time the site was hit by a major outage, in January, police in the US said that they had received five calls in just one city alone.

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