Apple Crash Detection Is Overwhelming Ski Town 911 Centers

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Ski season has a new character: unnecessary 911 calls.

As skiers with updated Apple Crash Detection and emergency response technology take to the slopes, nearby 911 call centers have been flooded with false emergency calls.

While Apple’s tech is intended to detect a crash and then automatically alert authorities, the latest version, which was introduced in September, seems to have an issue with false alarms while users are skiing with the iPhone 14s or Apple Watches, per The New York Times.

“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” one emergency services worker, Trina Dummer of Summit County, Colorado, which contains popular ski resorts like Breckenridge and Keystone, told the outlet.

Apple told Entrepreneur it has brought down the rate of mistaken crash detection with recent software updates, which users need to update their devices to access — and that it has more on the way.

In addition, the company said that it is continuing to work with 911 call-processing facilities on Crash Detection and even that the company has provided training materials and webinars.

Dummer told the NYT her center had 185 false Apple-related calls in mid-January in one week — twice the number of calls the facility would normally receive in that timeframe.

Apple introduced the first version of this type of technology in 2018 with Apple Watches called Fall Detection. The idea was it could tell if a wearer had a major fall, then could call emergency services.

At its yearly product event in September, Apple introduced Crash Detection, which has a new gyroscope and accelerometer for detecting higher amounts of G-force, company executives told TechCrunch. The technology comes with all the new iPhone 14s.

After setting off the detector, the phone screen says “crash detected” and gives 10 seconds to continue with the call or cancel it. If it does not get an answer, it gives another 10 seconds, but this time with “loud whoops to…

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