Some US emergency services operators say they are inundated with false calls placed by the Apple Watches or iPhone 14s of skiers and other fitness enthusiasts
911 dispatchers are buried under an avalanche of false, automated distress calls from skiers and other Apple device owners who are very much alive. Tweets: @rwcarpenterphd , @dannygroner , @adrianweckler , @dannydougherty , @apunkrockfuture , @stenbergtaylor , @shiraovide , @wendoverpro , and @kashhill Tweets: Ryan Carpenter / @rwcarpenterphd : Reviewers: This grant proposal lacks innovation because it relies on self-report instead of more objective indicators The objective indicator: https://www.nytimes.com/... Danny Groner / @dannygroner : “Winter has brought snowfall to ski resorts, and with it an avalanche of false emergency calls. Virtually all of them have been placed by Apple Watches or iPhone 14s under the mistaken impression that their owners have been debilitated in collisions.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Adrian Weckler / @adrianweckler : Teething problems (to say the least) with Apple's new 911-calling technology (Watch and phone), which is wasting some dispatchers' time. https://www.nytimes.com/... Danny Dougherty / @dannydougherty : Frustrating that we ignore protective, cheap but annoying solutions (using sensors to detect driving and locking the phone) but build expensive, after-the-fact but marketable solutions (using sensors to detect car crashes and automatically call 911) https://www.nytimes.com/... @apunkrockfuture : Maybe your Apple Watch is trying to kill you by calling the cops on you or maybe you're already dead https://www.nytimes.com/... Taylor Stenberg / @stenbergtaylor : 'My Watch Thinks I'm Dead' - 911 dispatchers are buried under an avalanche of false, automated distress calls from skiers and other Apple device owners who are very much alive. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : If a person made a false report to 911, that is a crime. https://www.nytimes.com/... Sam / @wendoverpro : Fun fact: Apple's new crash detection feature is a big issue for ski towns since it keeps thinking ski crashes are car crashes and calling 911 (people don't notice since they're busy skiing.) My local 911 call center is getting up to 50 of these a day vs its 40 “real” calls. @kashhill : And it's still going. Apple products designed to call 911 when their algorithms detect their owners have crashed are wreaking havoc this ski season. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of a problem Apple has been carrying since the iPhone 14 launch: within weeks of release, users reported crash detection firing false 911 calls during rollercoaster rides and hard phone drops. The winter ski season has now scaled that defect into an operational crisis for dispatchers, as impact-heavy sports like skiing sit squarely inside the sensor signature crash detection was tuned to catch.
The pattern is not new to Apple's hardware pipeline — police logged roughly 1,600 accidental 911 calls from a single Apple refurbishing center in Sacramento County, and back in 2017 a malicious Twitter link forced iPhones to dial 911 across a dozen states. What changed is that the trigger is now built into the default behavior of devices worn by millions of athletes.
First-order effects
- Emergency dispatchers at ski-region agencies are spending call-handling capacity verifying automated alerts from people who are uninjured, degrading response time for genuine emergencies.
- Apple faces pressure to retune crash-detection sensitivity on Apple Watch and iPhone 14, since every threshold change trades false positives against missed real crashes.
Second-order effects
- Ski resorts and other high-impact-activity venues become de facto test environments where Apple's sensor tuning is validated by public safety systems rather than by Apple's own QA.
- If false-call volume persists, device makers with similar safety features face pressure to add confirmation steps or risk regulators and 911 authorities imposing them.
Third-order effects
- Automated emergency calling from consumer wearables is heading toward a structural bottleneck: public 911 infrastructure was designed for human callers, so machine-originated alerts will need identity-and-intent verification layers — a proof-of-personhood problem applied to distress signals.
- Recurring false-alarm incidents give safety regulators a concrete case for mandating accuracy benchmarks before sensor-triggered emergency features ship at scale.
The trend: Consumer safety sensors are outpacing the emergency-response infrastructure they alert, forcing a redesign of how automated distress calls are verified and triaged.