Global Social Networks Outage Forced Users to Rush to PornHub

14:57 GMT, 15 March 2019

CC BY 2.0 / Marco Verch / Pornhub logo on a computer screen with a magnifying glass

Users experienced problems with access to social networks on 13 March, with some unable to log into their accounts for 10 hours. During this period, PornHub traffic witnessed an uptick. Immediately after the failure began, the number of visitors to the site increased by 11 per cent, and after a few hours, the figure reached 19 per cent.

Sputnik

A massive outage on Facebook and Instagram made users switch their attention to porn, according to PornHub web traffic stats.

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It is noted that many people used PornHub to search for atypical videos. The number of "Instagram" requests increased by 323 per cent, while "Facebook" searches went up by 221 per cent. Popular games, including "Fortnite", "Overwatch" and "WWE", were also searched more frequently on the site during the outage.

Moreover, the popularity of the celebrity searches increased by 72 per cent, with stars with the largest number of subscribers on Instagram, such as Ariana Grande, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Cristiano Ronaldo, proving the most popular.

In October 2018, YouTube's video-sharing failures also led to an influx of users on PornHub, with its traffic also jumping considerably.