The Great Facebook Outage

Friday I spotted an odd news report as I scrolled through my Facebook: Apparently Facebook had been out for about half an hour (I was busy working and watching Dirty Dancing with Patrick Swayze and didn't notice) and people had called 911 to report it.

I was stunned.

Admittedly I'm a Facebook addict. I love the stupid thing and even wrote a post on my other blog just a couple weeks ago about how it could be used in the future for genealogy as a source of life experiences, but like I said I hadn't even noticed the supposed outage. The thought that someone would be so distraught that they would call 911 over something so pithy was incredible to me, and I had to get to the bottom of it.

And by that I mean, I had to find someone who had called 911 and watch the monkey show play out on the internet for my amusement.

I'm a simple man...

I hunted all day, through news outlets and media sites for someone who was hearing the story and was defending their actions. Surely if someone was bold (or stupid) enough to call 911 over Facebook they would've posted something about how it's "the only way they have to share their cat" or "the only thing that keeps them connected to their high school crush 20 years later", but what I found was even more surprising:

Nothing.

Not one 911 call of someone trying to get help with Facebook.

Not one post of someone saying how horrible it was.

I started looking at the story from a different angle at this point. All I had really seen reported was a tweet sent out of a California police station from an Officer Brink, telling people to stop calling 911 about Facebook being down, and the rest was just people making fun of people for calling 911. So here's my thought: What if it didn't happen?

Yeah, Facebook went down, but what if instead of droves of people calling 911 complaining it was only like one or two, and maybe it was something quasi-legitimate. I have no idea what that would be, but a benefit of the doubt for a second that someone of reasonable intelligence called 911 and it was related to Facebook being down, and this officer got annoyed and posted a tweet, which then spiraled out of control.

A lot of people asked in their reaction to the story what this meant for society, and my question is, what does this story spiraling out of control and everyone, including yours truly, jumping on the bandwagon to call these people idiots mean for society? Has this digital age turned us all into wolves, eagerly waiting for any sign of weakness to exploit? Are we all just waiting with our JPEGs of Captain Picard and Riker facepalming themselves, watching for the perfect time to post them on a story of someone making a mistake for a laugh?

I'll admit, if by the time this post comes out they release 911 tapes or tweets or posts from people saying how panicked they were over Facebook going down, I'll probably grab a bowl of popcorn and watch the show, but what does this mean about us? Is our believed intellectual superiority really grounds to belittle others?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but it did give me something to think about.
-JOE