Pornhub saw a huge increase in traffic during Facebook outage

Earlier this week, Facebook suffered its largest outage in years, with services such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Workplace and Oculus all being inaccessible for hours on end.

The mass social media outage highlighted just how often we open our apps, hoping to get caught in the endless scroll. Still, it also provided the opportunity for us to exercise habits that don’t involve a screen.

Pornhub benefited hugely from the social media outage

While many people inevitably used the social media silence to get in touch with themselves through reading, exercise and maybe a quick traipse through the Twittersphere, it seems that others got in touch with themselves by literally touching themselves.

Thats’ right, according to Pornhub, traffic to the site increased by 10.5% during the Facebook outage. Now 10.5% doesn’t sound like much, but before you turn and scoff at the number, just know that it equates to around half a million users every hour.

According to the Pornhub Insights team, this isn’t the first time viewers have taken advantage of a social media hiccup to plug in to more provocative sites. The massive porn site also saw a similar pattern of behaviour during Facebook’s March 2019 outage, which saw Pornhub receive an 11% increase in visitors.

Why did Facebook go down?

Billions of Facebook users were unable to access their social media accounts on Monday due to a fault that the company described as ‘an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making.’

Facebook’s Vice President of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, explained that the failure occurred during routine maintenance when ‘a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally.’

Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command.

He continued: ‘This change caused a complete disconnection of our server connections between our data centres and the internet. And that total loss of connection caused a second issue that made things worse.’