I wish to believe, but probably there was real harm, probably someone will come up with some million figures.
Statistically, probably someone died during those minutes of terror and someone will try to attribute to this incident.
What is interesting that employee probably meant no harm, but compare this to that SWAT murder a month earlier. The prankster meant no harm either, but he's going to spend years in jail. Both for sending a wrong alert.
Swatting is intentional, triggering the alert wasn't (at least, so it seems). It's not like the operator pressed the button knowing that it would trigger an alert and expected it not to be taken seriously; he didn't mean to trigger the alert at all.
Ongoing car slams into you and kills your whole family while you were driving drunk; you go to jail for manslaughter and get sued by other driver for all you've got.
Are you kidding? The people who were involved in this didn’t do it to introduce the swattee to new friends. They did it to terrorize someone who made them mad.
What I meant is that “oh I didn’t mean it” going to be interpretted differently.
Edit: if you downvote me thinking that I somehow support prank swatters - you are wrong. Otherwise you fail to see the paradox of intended vs unintended outcomes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea (as I understand it's interpreted very different in the US).
The prankster intentionally sent a false alert and intended, at a minimum, to cause emergency response resources reserved for use in circumstances that pose a grave danger to be misallocated and to cause terror in the intended target; that involves both a diffuse but significant public harm and a narrowly focussed private harm.
It is not at all a case where no harm was intended.