In outdoor hot spots including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Canada, 911 centers report a rising number of false emergency reports from Apple devices.
When Jackson Hole Mountain Resort opened for the ski season the day after Thanksgiving, the local 911 center fielded at least half a dozen emergency calls from Apple phones and watches.
Apple had just added a new crash detection feature earlier that month. As a result, plenty of skiers were romping around the resort with phones ready to save their lives in the event of an accident.
The only problem? None of the emergencies were real, because Apple’s crash detection can’t tell the difference between a real accident and a skier taking a harmless fall into deep snow.
And because it automatically dials 911 either way, emergency responders can’t tell the difference either.
“It’s a really hard burden on our dispatchers,” Teton County Sheriff Matt Carr told GearJunkie this week. “Their desire is to help everybody. We don’t ignore calls. We just don’t do that … but how much resource allocation do we put toward these calls if most of them aren’t real emergencies?”
Across the United States and Canada, emergency dispatchers are asking themselves the same question. Reports from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and British Columbia suggest a rising problem with dispatchers fielding false alarms from Apple devices.
Thus far, Apple has made no official announcement that it’s working on a solution.
Apple turns on iPhone 14’s crash detection feature by default. Here’s how to turn it off.

A Far-Reaching Problem
Apple added the crash detection feature in November, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the rash of false alarm reports is (for the moment) coming from ski towns.
The tech company actually added automatic crash detection to its watches a few years ago. But now the feature has been added to iPhone 14s, so the phones call 911 whenever they sense a sudden impact. As a result, dispatchers have seen a spike in emergency calls from skiers’ phones.
In Colorado, at least five counties with busy ski areas have experienced record numbers of automated emergency calls, The Colorado Sun reported. Those include Grand, Eagle, Pitkin, Routt, and Summit counties. In Pitkin County, for example, 911 dispatch now gets 15-20 automated calls a day, according to the publication.
Dispatchers handle 911 calls in the order they are received, which means an automated call could postpone responses to real emergencies. So far, no help has been required in any of the automated calls in Summit County, Trina Dummer, the interim director of the Summit County 911 Center, told The Colorado Sun.
“We are absolutely diverting essential resources away from people who need it, toward a feature on a phone,” Dummer said.

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