Facebook & Instagram Outage

On March 13th, 2019 popular social media sites Facebook and Instagram experienced their biggest service outage ever. Beginning around 12pm Eastern Time, many users were unable to access the sites for up to 10 hours. The folks at CNET checked in to see if this outage had any effect on Pornhub’s traffic.

Much like we found during the YouTube outage in October, many users keep their fingers busy by heading to Pornhub while waiting for the SFW sites to come back online.

Immediately after the outage began, Pornhub’s traffic surged by up to 11% at 1pm. The increase in early evening traffic was even more dramatic, reaching as much as 19% above average at 7pm, already one of Pornhub highest viewing periods.

The increase in visits also caused a shift in the type of videos people were searching on March 13th. Perhaps unsurprisingly, searches for “Instagram” were up 323% and “Facebook” 221%. The next largest increase was “tentacle porn” by 308%, “wwe” by 274% and “game” by 236%. Other game related searches included a 97% increase for “Fortnite” and 133% for “Overwatch”.

Searches for “celebrity” were up 72% on March 13th, and many celebrities with strong following on Instagram and Facebook also saw large search increases. Compared to an average day, “Emrata” was searched 37% more often, “Ariana Grande” 32% more and “Shay Mitchell” by 29%.

“Kendall Jenner” searches increased by 25% followed closely by “Kylie Jenner” at 24%. The only male celebrity with a significant search increase was “Christiano Ronaldo” by 9%.

April Update:

On Sunday April 15th, Facebook and Instagram experienced another outage. This time Leggo.it asked us what effect that had on traffic from Italy.

Pornhub’s statisticians found that Italian traffic increased by up to 22.2% during the April outage and remained above average for the duration.