clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile
Will you help keep Vox free? Vox's journalism is free, so that everyone can understand our world. Reader support helps us do that. Will you give today?

Filed under:

Facebook Accidentally Pushes Lahore Safety Check Notification Worldwide

A Facebook glitch caused several people thousands of miles away to receive a notification asking to notify their friends that they were unharmed during the Lahore attacks.

By Johana Bhuiyan
The Verge

As it often does after natural or human-caused disasters, Facebook enabled its safety check feature so people who were near an explosion in Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park in Lahore, Pakistan, could notify their friends and family that they were unharmed. But today, more than two years after the company launched the feature, people thousands of miles away from the horrific attacks received a push notification asking them if they were okay and whether they wanted to notify their friends on Facebook as such.

Facebook is still unclear about what caused the glitch but is working to determine why it happened. According to reports, a suicide bomber killed 65 people and injured more than 280 others, many of whom where woman and children.

“We have activated Safety Check in Lahore,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We apologize to anyone who mistakenly received a notification outside of Pakistan and are working to resolve the issue.”

Several people in New York, the Bay Area and England tweeted screenshots of the notification, expressing their confusion over why they received it. However, not all users in these areas received the notification; the company is also still working to determine whether people outside of these areas received the notification.

This is the second safety check Facebook has had to enable in a week — the first being during the attack on Brussels a few days ago — and the fourth this month after the bombings in Ankara, Turkey, two weeks ago and the floods in Sao Paolo, Brazil, earlier this month. This is the seventh time the company has had to enable the safety check in 2016. (The first four were activated during the India earthquake in Manipur on Jan. 3, the Taiwan earthquake on Feb. 5, the Turkey bombing in Ankara on Feb. 17 and Cyclone Winston in Fiji on Feb. 20.)

In light of public criticism of a lack of media coverage of recent attacks in places like Ankara, Istanbul and Nigeria and a lack of a public outcry of support for the victims of those attacks, there appears to be a silver lining to today’s Facebook glitch. As many have pointed out on Twitter, more people are paying attention to the attacks in Pakistan because of this notification.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Next Up In Technology

The Latest

Israel moves into southern Gaza after a week-long truce — and its goals are murkier than ever

By Ellen Ioanes

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, briefly explained

By Avishay Artsy

The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment

By Dylan Matthews

George Santos’s messy expulsion vote, briefly explained

By Li Zhou

Netflix’s Squid Game reality show is kinda great. Oh no.

By Alex Abad-Santos

How Israel fractured the left and united the right

By Avishay Artsy