Police say an Apple refurbishing center in Sacramento County has made ~1,600 accidental 911 calls since Oct. 2017; Apple says it's investigating
ELK GROVE (CBS13) - Emergency dispatchers in Elk Grove and Sacramento County are seeing an influx of false alarm 911 calls flooding their emergency communication centers.
Context & Ripple Effects
This story is an early entry in what has become a running problem for emergency dispatchers: machines dialing 911 without a human in distress. The Sacramento County refurbishing center's ~1,600 accidental calls since Oct. 2017 predate the wave that followed, when [[a:983660|iPhone 14 crash detection began triggering false alarms on rollercoasters and after phone drops]], and US operators reported being inundated with false calls from Apple Watches and iPhones worn by skiers.
Apple isn't alone in the loop: UK police blamed Android's side-button Emergency SOS for a surge of false 999 calls, prompting Google to update the feature — evidence that every vendor automating emergency calling eventually confronts the same false-alarm bill.
First-order effects
- Elk Grove and Sacramento County dispatchers have absorbed roughly 1,600 phantom calls since Oct. 2017, tying up emergency communication centers, while Apple says it is investigating its own facility as the source.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces the same tuning dilemma Google already acted on: keep automatic emergency triggers sensitive enough to save lives or throttle them to protect dispatch capacity — and each fix shifts the burden onto the other platform's users and call centers.
Third-order effects
- From the 2017 malicious-link incident that forced iPhones to dial 911 across a dozen states to crash detection and now a refurbishing line, the pattern points toward 911 infrastructure needing technical filtering for machine-originated calls — a shift that would pull carriers, device makers, and public-safety agencies into setting standards for who (or what) may place an emergency call.
The trend: As phones and wearables gain automatic emergency-calling features, 911 systems are increasingly flooded by machine-generated false alarms, forcing Apple and Google alike to retrofit safeguards.