Who you gonna call?
At the end of July, Facebook servers nose-dived and there was a major outage of service across the USA and Europe. Being without Facebook for a couple of hours isn't the end of the world, but police in Los Angeles had to issue a plea to the public to stop calling 911 about it and face real life instead.
Californians don't have a monopoly on questionable calls to the emergency services. UK police have released details of some of their recent strange 999 calls and which includes a gem from a woman in the West Midlands who called them over an argument with an ice cream van about the number of sprinkles on her ice cream. "It doesn't seem like much of an emergency," she told the operator, "but it is a little bit."
Operators in Norfolk fielded a call where the emergency was someone needing to know where they could find a late night chemist, and over in Wales, the NHS has this year had calls to 999 from a man in Milford Haven with a fly in his ear, a woman in Llandudno who had dropped the TV remote and wanted someone to come round and pick it up for her, and a man from Towyn who had noticed a bruise on his foot. And back in the area of high tech time wasting, the West Midlands 999 desk received an emergency call from a woman who had forgotten the password to her laptop.
We can smile at these panic responses to minor issues but did we dodge a real emergency recently? On 23rd of July, a solar storm produced two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the surface of the sun, bubbles of hot plasma which fire out from the sun at some 2,000 miles per second. The two CMEs were 15 minutes apart, and if they had erupted just nine days earlier they would have been on a direct collision course with the earth.
Scientists writing in Space Weather Journal say these two CMEs were the largest yet recorded, and we'd have had less than one day's warning of their arrival. Had they hit us, the authors warn, they could have taken out GPS and telecommunications satellites, electricity grids, and some of our unshielded electronic equipment and servers.
To put this in perspective though, others have called this a worst case scare-mongering scenario and reckon that we would simply have enjoyed a fantastic aurora lights display that night, but isn't that how The Day Of The Triffids starts? Fortunately, we haven't had to find out who is correct, not yet anyway, which means we only have to worry about climate change and flooding, declining oil resources, global pandemics, rising sea levels and coastal erosion, earthquakes in California, volcanoes in Iceland, being hit by a comet, and running out of IP numbers.
27th August 2014
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.