The Big Winners of the Facebook and Instagram Outages? Twitter and Porn

In case you missed it, Facebook (including its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp) faced global outages most of Monday afternoon.

According to the Associated Press: “A massive global outage plunged Facebook, its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and many people who rely heavily on these services — including Facebook’s own workforce — into chaos Monday. The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET and was still unfixed more than six hours later, although scattered users have reported partial restoration of one service or another. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare. “This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.”

Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that the Facebook outage felt like a “snow day.” But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties.https://t.co/XWFQ3P8MdR

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 4, 2021

While the cause has yet to be determined a few outcomes are certain: Twitter and porn saw huge upticks in usage.

Traffic to Dreamcam — the first VR live camming platform for the adult entertainment space — is skyrocketing, which Peter Williams, a Dreamcam VP, attributes to the social media sites being down.

As of 4 p.m. ET:

• Traffic on the site is up 240%. For the same 24 hour period a day before.
• Time on the site is up 49%. Not only are more people coming to the site, but they are staying longer.
• New users increased by 26%. People are looking for new things to do.

“I don’t want to benefit from anyone’s misfortune, but like Twitter and Jack Dorsey the Dreamcam and the adult entertainment space is ripping right now,” said Peter Williams, VP of Dreamcam in a statement. “We’re seeing traffic and time on site numbers like never before, which can only be attributable to the social networks’ outages. People are either bored without Facebook and Instagram content to peruse and are looking for something to do. Or, for some who pleasure themselves to sexy Instagram posts, they are looking for other content to do ‘use’. It’s quite fascinating to watch this unfold.”