Facebook and Instagram outages send surfers to Pornhub for tentacle porn
Searches for Instagram and Facebook-related porn spiked during the outage.
On Wednesday, Facebook went down. Instagram too. The internet collectively stared at the blank pages of its nonexistence, shrugged and headed on over to Pornhub instead.
Facebook and Instagram went down and Pornhub went up.
Pornhub received a lot of love during the epic outage. Traffic spiked immediately by 11 percent and then went even higher in the early evening, hitting as much as 19 percent above average, Pornhub reports.
There's more to this than just social media-deprived internet users randomly watching porn videos on one of the internet's most popular porn sites.
Pornhub also noted a 323 percent spike in searches for "Instagram" and a 221 percent jump in searches for "Facebook." Yes, that means people were pining so bad, they wanted to watch Instagram and Facebook-themed sexy videos.
There was plenty to keep these searchers busy. Pornhub tells CNET there are 2,500 videos available with "Instagram" in the title.
That all seems pretty much in line, but Pornhub also noted a 308 percent increase in searches for "tentacle porn." In case you don't know what that is, check out our explainer on monster porn. What is it about Facebook and Instagram being down that makes people get hot about tentacles? We're not sure.
Pornhub's stats also logged a rise in searches for WWE, Fortnite and Marvel.
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Pornhub's fortunes tend to rise and fall with major internet events. A YouTube outage last October sent Pornhub traffic spiking. Also in 2018, traffic to the porn site dipped during Apple's iPhone XS event.
The Facebook failure just shows that a lot of internet users are willing to kill time any way possible, whether it's staring at status updates or perusing sexy beasts. If it's not one thing, it's another.
Even if that thing is, you know, tentacles.