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08th Oct 2021

Pornhub traffic surged by more than 10 per cent during Facebook outage

Steve Hopkins

Guess everyone didn’t just on Twitter after all!

Facebook’s global outage on Monday, it seems, was a reminder to many overusers of social media to get a grip.

Reports suggest that when the platform went down for around five hours, taking Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger with it, use of PornHub spiked by up to 10.5 per cent. 

Guess everyone didn’t go to Twitter after all.

According to the Pornhub Insights team, the spike amounts to about half a million additional users during each hour that Facebook’s services were down.

Billions of Facebook users worldwide were unable to get online on Monday evening.

Cloudflare explained the outage simply as if  “someone had pulled the cables from their data centres all at once and disconnected them from the internet”.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUpz4ZyorLP/

Facebook’s explanation was a little more complicated: “Configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication”. This had a “cascading effect… bringing our services to a halt”.

Downdetector, which tracks outages, said some 10.6 million problems were reported around the world – the largest number ever recorded, the BBC reported.

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