Facebook users dial 911 over outage, cops frown

Will you call 911 if Facebook goes off the radar? This is exactly some users in Los Angeles did when the popular social networking site Friday suffered its second brief outage in two months.

According to LA County Sheriff sergeant Burton Brink, they received "several" calls from dissatisfied Facebook users seeking a solution to the error message they faced while logging into Facebook.

Frustrated, Brink wrote a message on Twitter: "Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please do not call us about it being down, we do not know when FB will be back up!"

Brink explained it was done to prevent more people from calling about the problem.

"We get phone calls all the time, whether it be Facebook going down," Brink was quoted as saying in a Fortune report.

But with Facebook in particular, we get calls probably because it's such a widely-used thing, he added.

Facebook responded to the 35-minute outage, saying, "Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We will update shortly."