YouTube experienced a rare global service outage on October 16th, between 9:30 pm and 10:45 pm Eastern time. Mashable checked with us to see if YouTube’s disruption an effect on Pornhub traffic, and it certainly did. When you can’t tube, you fap instead!
Traffic to Pornhub surged during the outage, reaching 21% above daily averages at 10 pm. That’s a significant increase by millions of additional viewers during Pornhub’s peak evening hours.
During the outage, our statisticians also found some search terms had increased in popularity well above their average levels on October 16th. Searches for “asmr” increased by 201%, as people looking for an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response were just as likely to find that on Pornhub as YouTube. Searches containing “YouTube” increased by 183%, along with other terms likely to appear on both streaming sites including “wwe”, “bowsette“, “fortnite“, “minecraft“, “game”, “pokemon“, “celebrity” (nsfw), “twitch”, “overwatch” and “halloween“.
To see how other events cause Pornhub’s traffic to fluctuate, check out our Apple Special Event, 2018 World Cup, Fortnite Server Outage, and Hawaii Missile Alert insights.