Never down: Pornhub says traffic surged by millions of active users during Facebook outage

One of the world’s most visited websites, Pornhub, became even more popular this week, its data analysis shows. With Instagram and FB inaccessible, Internet users entertained themselves online with “adults only” content.

Pornhub detected an increase in its traffic on Monday, when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all down for some six hours in a major worldwide outage. During this quiet time, “about half a million additional users during each hour” flocked to the website offering adult content, Pornhub revealed by publishing its October 4 average hourly traffic.

The peak of active users, “as much as +10.5%,” was registered at around 1pm Eastern Time (ET), prompting some commentators to question others’ activities during working hours.

However, 1pm ET is 7pm Central European Summer Time and around 2am in many Asian countries. 

Pornhub said it had seen “similar traffic increases” in previous years when social media platforms were offline. On Monday, Telegram messenger said it also gained new users during the outage, with more than 70 million people signing up in a single day. 

Explaining the historic blackout, believed to be one of the longest ever Facebook disruptions, Mark Zuckerberg’s company said the outage was “an error of our own making.” The “complete disconnection of our server connections between our data centers and the internet” had nothing to do with “malicious activity,” it reassured. There is speculation suggesting the outage was caused by some sort of a hack and that user data might have been compromised.  

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