In the wake of Sunday’s bombing that killed more than 70 people and injured hundreds in Lahore, Pakistan, Facebook enlisted its “Safety Check” to ensure the well-being of those within the radius of the bombing.
In many cases, however, the Facebook app wrongly alerted metro Atlanta Facebook users. Reports of Facebook mistakenly sending the alert began Sunday afternoon from across the world, just hours after Pakistani police announced the explosion at Gulshan-e-Iqbal park, which claimed the lives of mainly women and children, and wounded 300 people.
The alert begins with “Are you OK?” and goes on to suggest those receiving the message “let friends know that you’re safe.”
The message befuddled some local Twitter users, who initially assumed the explosion occured in Georgia after receiving the mobile Safety Check message.
The mistaken alert also affected Facebook users internationally, according to Tech Insider. Menna Alaa, a 22-year-old resident of Cairo, told the Insider she had never visited Pakistan or posted about Pakistan.
"We have activated Safety Check in Lahore. We apologize to anyone who mistakenly received a notification outside of Pakistan and are working to resolve the issue," a Facebook spokesman said in an email to Mashable.
Facebook activated the Safety Check feature following the Brussels and Paris attacks in the past year, without geo-tagging errors. So far, it’s unclear whether people in Pakistan also received the notification and have been able to use Safety Check to get in contact with friends or family members who might have been affected by the explosion.
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