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Only Facebook could create Safety Check, not because of resources as you might expect, but because Facebooks lets employees build crazy things like Safety Check and because only Facebook has 1.5 billion geographically distributed users, with a degree of separation between them of only 4.74 edges, and only Facebook has users who are fanatical about reading their news feeds. A small team couldn’t build a big pipeline and index, so they wrote some hacky PHP and effectively got the job done at scale.
This paper details how Facebook build Safety Check
Essential read on this new technology from Facebook that was made possible because of the social graph that Facebook builds. Impressive if only because the solution was easy to build.
Also read the companion article for a high-level description rather than this detailed one: http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/11/14/how-facebooks-safety-check-works.html