Pornhub/PAWhat happens when one bit of the internet goes down? Just go on another bit I guess.
That seems to have been many people’s response during the recent Facebook and Instagram outage anyway.
However, it seems many people had the same thought when it came to finding something else to do instead of scrolling through social media – apparently they threw their hands in the air and just thought ‘well, may as well go on porn then’.
According to Pornhub, traffic on their website spiked during Facebook and Instagram’s down time. Strangely, what also spiked was Pornhub-users searching for ‘Facebook’ and ‘Instagram’.
Picture the scene:
Person 1: Dude, Facebook is down.
Person 2: Yeah man, Instagram’s all whack too.
Person 1: What are we gonna do?Both: Pornhub!
Person 1: What are you gonna search for?
Person 2: I dunno man, all this talk about social media has got me thinking…
Person 1: Duuuuude we are so on the same wavelength.
*fistbump*
OK, so my dialogue might need work, but you get the idea.
The story gets weirder still though, as – according to Pornhub Insights – the search for ‘tentacle porn’ also spiked during the outage.
Picture the scene:
Person 1: What are you gonna search for?
Person 2: I dunno man, all this talk about social media got me thinking…Person 3: Tentacles?
Person 1: What?
Person 2: Get out.
According to the stats site, searches for ‘Instagram’ on Pornhub went up 323 per cent, ‘Facebook’ porn searches went up 221 per cent. During the outage, which lasted for around 10 hours on March 13, ‘tentacle porn’ searches rose by 308 per cent, ‘wwe’ by 274 per cent, ‘game’ by 236 per cent, as well as a 97 per cent increase in people searching for ‘Fortnite’ on the adult site.
Thankfully, Pornhub was able to provide for its users, as it currently has 2,500 videos with ‘Instagram’ in the title, CNET report.
The moment you were waiting for. Traffic to Pornhub spiked 19% while @instagram and @facebook were down yesterday! pic.twitter.com/760pdvsnUE
— Pornhub ARIA (@Pornhub) March 14, 2019
March 13 also saw a spike in celebrity searches on the website – ‘celebrity’ itself was up 72 per cent, while individuals were up too, with ‘Emrata’ rising 37 percent, ‘Ariana Grande’ 32 per cent, and ‘Kendal Jenner’ by 25 per cent. Searches for ‘Cristiano Ronaldo’ also rose by 9 per cent.
This isn’t the first time social media’s loss was porn’s gain. In October last year, YouTube went down for roughly one hour and 15 minutes – much less than Facebook and Instagram’s 10-hour outage.
Despite the short time scale, Pornhub traffic spiked by 21 per cent while YouTube wasn’t working, equating to ‘millions of additional viewers’ during Pornhub‘s ‘peak evening hours’, Pornhub Insights reports.
Got to fill your time somehow, I suppose.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.