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Old Facebook fire notification causes mass confusion in Dallas

The now three day-old post was sending undated push notifications, prompting users to believe there was an active fire Friday

By Dennis Jansen
The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS The fire was on Tuesday.

Users across the D-FW area received Facebook notifications Friday morning about a multi-alarm “fire in Dallas.”

The fire in question is a 6-alarm Dallas hotel fire that happened on Tuesday.

Although Facebook’s safety check page is dated Sept. 20, the push notifications that it generates are undated. This caused many users to believe that the fire was an active event on Friday morning.

Notifications are pushed to the friends of users who mark themselves “safe” on the safety check page. The notifications appear for both mobile and desktop Facebook users without a date.

This understandably lead to confusion.

The Grand Hotel in Far North Dallas caught fire on Tuesday. The cause of the fire was an electrical short.

More than 120 firefighters responded to try to extinguish the fire, which largely centered around the unit it began in, Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman Jason Evans said.

The hotel is located in the 7800 block of Interstate 635, near Coit Road.

Copyright 2016 The Dallas Morning News

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