Facebook is basically everywhere, connecting to almost 22% of the world’s population. So if you need to find out in a hurry — during a natural disaster or a large-scale attack — if people in the area are doing okay, Facebook is well-positioned to be the quickest, fastest tool for that. To that end, they created safety check a while back. Except for one small detail: a tool for seeing who is okay based on their location only works if you know that Pittsburgh and Pakistan aren’t the same place.
Facebook activated their safety check feature this weekend after a horrific bombing in Lahore, Pakistan. But when they sent push notifications asking people “near the affected area” to check in, something went wrong. Some kind of bug rippled through their systems, and Facebook users all over the world, including the United States, got the notice.
Mashable rounded up several Tweets from confused users in Virginia, Pittsburgh, New York, Illinois, as well as overseas, wondering why they were being sent notifications asking them to check in after an event on the other side of the world.
Facebook told media over the weekend that “We worked to resolve the issue,” and apologized to anyone who mistakenly got the notice. They still haven’t said, though, how such a wide-reaching error happened to begin with.
by Kate Cox via Consumerist
No comments:
Post a Comment