Facebook Apologizes for Safety Check Bug After Lahore Bombing
In October 2014, Facebook instituted the Safety Check tool on the social networking platform as a way of checking on one's friends and family in the event of disasters. According to Mark Zuckerberg, it was Facebook's way of "helping our community during natural disasters and gives you an easy and simple way to say you're safe and check on all your friends and family in one place."
According to a report in The Verge, the Safety Check notifications tool was activated after recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Nigeria and Belgium. In the more recent attack in Lahore, Pakistan, the tool was deployed too, sending out notifications to users who are near the area, asking them if they are affected by the explosion or not and whether they are safe or not. Unfortunately, the tool also sent notifications to users who were nowhere near Pakistan when the bombing happened.
According to the report, some users in the U.S. and U.K. got notifications from the tool and in some cases the SMS received was a vague question: "Are you affected by the explosion?" which likely caused confusion or even panic to whoever received it. There were also users in Pakistan who received notifications but they were located far from Lahore. Some Facebook users took to Twitter to complain about the SMS and notifications.
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Facebook on the other hand admitted that there was a bug that caused the tool to mistakenly send notifications to people who were not located near the area of the explosion. They also issued an apology for the mistake. They said in their post on their disaster response page: "We hope the people in the area of the bombing find Safety Check a useful and helpful way to let their friends and family know they are okay. Unfortunately, many people not affected by the crisis received a notification asking if they were okay. This kind of bug is counter to our intent. We worked quickly to resolve the issue and we apologize to anyone who mistakenly received the notification."
