Facebook Debuts 'Im Safe' Tool for Natural Disasters

That's worst case scenario. More often or not if a local tower went down, there is bound to be others that can pick up your signal. In the event of a disaster, it's easier to send one message to FB than having to do multiple phone calls/texts to friends and family. Chances are everyone that is important in your life is on your FB, this way you can let them all know in one shot that you are fine, then you can make the individual phone calls and such.

That's exactly the point and the reason why they developed this.

While physical damage to infrastructure can cause problems, the vast majority of problems encountered during a natural disaster aren't due to that at all. The major thing that tends to bring cellular networks and the internet to their collective knees after a disaster is the incredible amount of network traffic. With everyone trying to notify everyone they know that they survived and are ok; you have far more traffic than the network is able to accommodate. This kind of short term spike of usage by an incredible magnitude is why you often see temporary cell sites and other temporary improvements done before the Super Bowl and other major events.

By streamlining notific...
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