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Pornhub Traffic Surged By More Than 10 Percent During Facebook Outage

Pornhub Traffic Surged By More Than 10 Percent During Facebook Outage

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger went down, evidently leaving people with time on their hands

Jake Massey

Jake Massey

As you're almost definitely aware, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger went down the other day (Monday 4 October).

For many of us, the five-hour blackout really laid bare how dependent we have become on social media, leaving us at a loose end.

And so, what did you do with your evening instead? Bit of yoga? Perhaps you did some watercolour painting? Or did you just have a w**k?

A lot of people sought solace on Pornhub.
Alamy

The evidence suggests many of you went with the latter. That's because Pornhub saw its traffic surge by as much as 10.5 percent during the outage.

According to the Pornhub Insights team, that amounts to about half a million additional users during each hour that Facebook's services were down.

Honestly guys, you're given an opportunity to be productive without any distractions and this is what you do.

Facebook's loss was Pornhub's gain.
Pornhub Insights

Billions of Facebook users were unable to get online on Monday because of the fault, which the company said was 'an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making'.

Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, said that during what was 'routine maintenance work' on the firm's backbone network 'a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally'.

Sounds like someone is in deep s**t then.

Writing in a blog post he said: "Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command.

"This change caused a complete disconnection of our server connections between our data centres and the internet. And that total loss of connection caused a second issue that made things worse."

The blackout lasted more than five hours.
SOPA Images Limited/Alamy Live News

Santosh said it took a while to fix because Facebook had to bring the servers back online slowly, to avoid any further issues.

"We knew that flipping our services back on all at once could potentially cause a new round of crashes due to a surge in traffic," he explained.

"Every failure like this is an opportunity to learn and get better, and there's plenty for us to learn from this one.

"After every issue, small and large, we do an extensive review process to understand how we can make our systems more resilient. That process is already under way."

Featured Image Credit: Alamy

Topics: World News, Facebook, PornHub