16 ms·

When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up

397 points by donohoe 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
imgabe 5y ago
Yeah, from people looking for news about why Facebook is down.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  and what they did after they found out
slackstation 5y ago
Traffic for basically every site went up. People thought it was an internet-wide DDOS attack when it was just the 3B people on FB's properties finding entertainment elsewhere.
- BitAstronaut 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure I saw reports that internet speed tests were going down as well from people checking their connections. I can't confirm it but if it's true, it's pretty interesting the chain reaction that occurred.
- Guest19023892 5y ago
  Were people finding entertainment elsewhere or simply opening news sites and Twitter to read why Facebook and Instagram were down?
  - unicornporn 5y ago
    This.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    even fb/ig regulars should be able to find that information quickly so i guess they indeed did not "log off" after that.
- tayo42 5y ago
  traffic at my job was funny, it was chaos trying to handle it, then facebook came back and you can see it in the charts the drop in requests. it was a pretty quick return to normal. idk im surprised people just like didnt go do other things, like we just have to scroll?
treefry 5y ago
Traffic to Pornhub went up by 10%
- aesyondu 5y ago
  I thought you were kidding. Link for reference: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2021 https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...
the_70x 5y ago
Makes me thing the possibilities of social media governing the news feeds by algorithms. Is not good in any way
cblconfederate 5y ago
How can one take their website off facebook (i.e. disallow linking altogether?).
- blowski 5y ago
  You can’t, if they’re simple unauthenticated HTTP links then you can’t stop that link being copied and pasted. I guess you could look for Facebook’s spiders retrieving content and block those requests. But why bother?
- shakna 5y ago
  Pinterest allows you to block being pinned with: <meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" description="Sorry, but no. No pinning." /> However, I believe that they are the only social media site (that I can find), that supports that kind of behaviour.
crypt1d 5y ago
News sites traffic surge can be explained by people trying to figure out why FB/Instagram are not working. What's more interesting for me is that Pornhub's traffic surged by 10% [1] during the outage ;) [1] - https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2021 https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...
oarabbus_ 5y ago
I for one am not surprised that when one of the top 3 most-visited-domains in the world goes down, other sites are visited more often, in particular news sites.
- eminence32 5y ago
  I am also not surprised, though I'm not sure I would have guessed the increase in traffic to other sites would be this large (38%). It's always nice, though, to see data that confirms your intuition.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    The non-tech public wouldn't know where to go to look, so the newsies seems logical.
    - lugged 5y ago
      Its "why is Facebook down" questions and looking it up on newssites.
      - alex_young 5y ago
        Seems like a plausible idea. I can think of some others. Why is this one more likely?
      - Griffinsauce 5y ago
        That is an assumption. It could also just be looking for their content fix.
        GuySake 5y ago
        Well ... maybe that's a small proof. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=facebook,facebook%20down https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=facebook,facebook...
- 5y ago
luxuryballs 5y ago
awesome this is exactly what I was looking to find out that day, clearly it was obvious it would happen but I wanted to see the data
bluesmoon 5y ago
How much of the increase was due to reloads since when facebook goes down, the performance of sites that include FB javascript tends to get worse. For example, see https://www.akamai.com/blog/news/the-impact-of-third-party-scripts-on-the-facebook-outage https://www.akamai.com/blog/news/the-impact-of-third-party-s... and https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1445244384598011906 https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1445244384598011906
newsbinator 5y ago
I immediately went to a news site to see if there was news about Whatsapp being down
marketingtech 5y ago
And non-Amazon ecommerce sales (*according to one major third-party warehouse company) went down 27%. https://twitter.com/AaronandML/status/1445162492909531137 https://twitter.com/AaronandML/status/1445162492909531137
- HenryKissinger 5y ago
  I (don't) like how online retail is now either "Amazon" or "non-Amazon".
  - rob74 5y ago
    On one hand, it's worrying that Amazon is so huge that we have these two categories; on the other hand we should be glad that there still is some "non-Amazon" left...
    - hnbad 5y ago
      This assumes it's in Amazon's interest for there not to be. Theoretically all companies under capitalism would want to become true monopolies because having competition means leaving money on the table, but in practice a duopoly or a de facto monopoly is preferable to skirt regulations and interventions. There is a good reason Google still props up Mozilla despite competing with them in the browser space. It would also be interesting so see how many of the larger non-Amazons run on AWS.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    It's payment safety. There are many sites I want to buy off of, but just don't trust them with my banking info. And yes--I know many websites accept Paypal. Amazon is just ease of mind with the negative of counterfeit products. (I think I'm hellbanned again, but don't really care.)
  - herbst 5y ago
    If Amazon ever tries to get into Switzerland again we are getting the pitchforks out. It's so nice to have hundreds of small online shops actually competing with quality and or cheap products. Instead of a AliExpress clone with worse support.
TedShiller 5y ago
When Facebook went down this week, the world was a better place
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  The internet was a better place. FB is such a big time sink that it chokes almost everything else except the 3-4 huge outliers.
oblib 5y ago
What cracked me up about this is how many "FB Friends" of mine think FB did it on purpose. "They were erasing data" is one the theories I was told.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- a-dub 5y ago
  THE SINGULARITY HAPPENED IN FB'S AI RESEARCH GROUPS, IT WAS A LAST DITCH EFFORT TO PREVENT IT FROM ESCAPING!
  - kongin 5y ago
    I'd read a short story about it.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Do you remember what story it was?
- inb4_cancelled 5y ago
  "They were erasing data" is afaik the current Qanon explanation after they slowly realized this wasn't the "ten days of darkness".
- hnbad 5y ago
  I find that the type of person who thinks FB did this intentionally (either to "erase data" or as a distraction) vastly overestimates the impact of whistleblowers. There have been ex-FB employees publicly accusing the company of enabling foreign political interference in the US, lynching mobs forming via WhatsApp, governments spreading misinformation, not to mention gross privacy abuses by its own employees. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Heck, nothing fundamentally changed after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video (in fact, there have now been reports that the supposed retaliatory precision strike in Afghanistan actually killed an aid worker and his children and this too changes nothing) and nothing fundamentally changed after the Snowden leaks. Obama literally went on public television and admitted to torture and nothing fundamentally changed. As much as us nerds tend to think otherwise, information on its own changes nothing. Scandals like this are just another piece of outrage fuel to be consumed on social media and to be liked, shared and subscribed to. Without actually organizing and defining solutions rather than just the problems, nothing fundamentally changes. Otherwise the best you can hope for is the POTUS reading off a script while making a concerned face or Congress passing a toothless bill before things return to normal.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
I remember when my town lost power for a week. It was glorious. People started talking to their neighbours, kids started playing outside. Magic. Does Facebook really make anyone's life better? Sometimes I wish I born before the internet, or even a century ago.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  I wish I was born at a time so that I'd be able to experience the early internet. And then die of natural causes, so that I didn't have to live through the hell that is the internet today. (A bit dramatic - it's meant to be satiric).
- elvischidera 5y ago
  I mean, if you really want it today, there are places in the world you could go to that have little to no internet access. Where people still communicate mostly in-person. (I'm only half joking haha). > Does Facebook really make anyone's life better? I can only answer for myself. It made my life better: 1. At the start of my career, I got connections, jobs, etc from local groups. 2. I connected with old school mates I wouldn't have found other wise. 3. ... My assumption is when people are not addicted or living/following fake lives on social media, there is a lot of benefits to it.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  You could move somewhere like Pitcairn Island, it’s actively looking for immigrants or at least it was last time I checked. There’s other isolated island communities out there which are a bit less extreme too with limited access to the internet. Saint Helena would be an example, although I’m not sure what the immigration requirements are. You could also get into sailing, specifically offshore cruising. Until Starlink becomes available for mobile installations your options are either ruinously expensive and slow satellite internet or if you’re a radio amateur shortwave services for email and SSB voice.
lowlevel 5y ago
I don't know about you guys, but I only went to the news to find out what happened to facebook.
asutekku 5y ago
We saw an increase in traffic in all of our portfolio's mobile games so instead of "News sites saw more traffic because of Facebook was down" it was "People did something else than browse Facebook while Facebook was down".
- 3np 5y ago
  I'd wager so did HN and Pornhub. I don't think there's that much to news specifically, even if some love to push a certain narrative there.
  - inanutshellus 5y ago
    For sure HN did; it was struggling to stay up from the load. Several threads were suggesting logging out -- which would let HN load static content -- to help it load, for example.
- a-dub 5y ago
  this seems right to me. would love to see a real analysis of what sort of traffic news sites saw. my hunch is, yeah, maybe people had a look to see if the news confirmed their suspicions... but then maybe stayed a while and/or sought out alternatives for the ultimate distraction contraption.
- nothis 5y ago
  Still a good thing.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    Its not a 'good' thing or a 'bad' thing, its just basic logic. Same as saying people who wanted to go to the park did something else instead because the park was closed. Its not good or bad. It just 'is'.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Well, and also, people probably googled "is facebook down", and clicked on the various carousel news stories.
oefrha 5y ago
I wonder what kind of percentage increase in traffic YouTube and TikTok saw during the Facebook and Instagram outage.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
And this is what's motivating the establishment's campaign against social media. Many people think that information should go through gatekeepers - that people shouldn't be able to share information peer-to-peer without filters. The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook. And the claims are all disingenuous nonsense. The Facebook "whistleblower" for example explained how she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  The Facebook whistleblower who wants more censorship and all the news sites made it such a big deal. It was all very convenient how things happened.
- amelius 5y ago
  The solution is to set FB's incentives right, which can be done by banning ads from social networks. With this solution, no other type of censoring is necessary.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Many people think that information should go through gatekeepers - that people shouldn't be able to share information peer-to-peer without filters. The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook" You think Facebook not a gatekeeper? You think it liberalized speech? 4chan is free speech, facebook just privatised hate
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Facebook is far less of a gatekeeper than traditional news media.
nickpp 5y ago
And now we understand why media hates FB so much: they compete for the same attention.
cmckn 5y ago
“The twin towers went down this week and traffic to news sites went up”
helb 5y ago
If anyone else is wondering what that "dark social" in the chart is: > […] social shares that do not contain any digital referral information about the source. > In contrary to the sharing on social networking service like Facebook, which is done publicly, Dark social is done privately through IRC channels, emails, SMS or simply copy-and-paste and other ways of private sharing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_social_media)
- hnbad 5y ago
  That's an amazingly sinister term to describe what was the norm prior to the rise of Google Analytics and its equivalents.
  - resonious 5y ago
    I thought the same thing. It seems like marketers really hate it though. > To combat this lack of transparency, websites can include more attractive ways to share links than simply copy-pasting into another application; ... I guess one man's privacy is another man's "lack of transparency".
    - gjvnq 5y ago
      > I guess one man's privacy is another man's "lack of transparency". A good example of this are jobs that post your salary online. Those are usually in government and some NGOs. Interestingly, some Nordic countries allow people to see each others income tax info.
Teknoman117 5y ago
I was actually quite happy when I heard about the outage. I’ve managed to disconnect myself from Facebook’s services sufficiently that I didn’t even notice they were down...
- herbst 5y ago
  Same here. I thought Cloudflare is having issues as the whole internet appeared slow that day. I only read that FB is down on hacker news hours later.
jnsaff2 5y ago
"Twitter would have literally exploded" the site went blank mid sentence, was there anything of note afterwards? /s
pantulis 5y ago
Did any other third party site stop working because the FB tracking codes started failing? Or mobile apps for that matter using FB's SDK.
giords 5y ago
Well, I guess most of the people wanted to know what was going on... with Facebook. And waste time somewhere else. It's interesting anyways to see proof that most people likely didn't use the extra free time to stay off the internet. We truly are internet junkies.
Eric-J 5y ago
the really news sites calculating on your finger hand, as the rest news sites it like culture sites.
muppetman 5y ago
Same as when any other perceived disaster strikes, news traffic spikes so people can learn more about the disaster. (Cue the pile on of "But this wasn't a real disaster", sure. But unfortunately for a lot of people, it really was. They couldn't communicate with loved ones etc.) How is this a surprise?
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  If you wanted, you could call it a major disruption. I don't know exactly what makes an event a "real disaster", but I agree that suddenly being isolated from your family is a significant event, and if anyone wanted to belittle your characterisation, they should probably recallibrate their understanding of the world. (And they should also be careful to distinguish their oughts and their is-es.)
- serial_dev 5y ago
  There are many possible explanations for this outcome, and probably all of them played some role in this, though it's hard for me to tell which one is the most important. One factor is that people wanted to know how this whole outage evolves (your example). It's similar to a "disaster", so people want to know the latest updates. It's not a surprise, but it might not explain the whole picture. Another factor is that Facebook (when it's up) has a negative effect on most news site's traffic. People might find your news article on Facebook, but most of the time, they just skim the title, and read the comments on Facebook, and they don't bother visiting your website (or they don't stay there and browse the rest of the articles). This could be interesting for you if you've been following the love-hate relationship that news websites and Facebook have been having for almost a decade now.
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
It's a good reminder in humility to any of us making services or products of any kind that however many happy users and great reviews we have, if the service disappears people will use something else. If I go to hacker news whilst procrastination lock out is on I curse and go to another news site. If the top 10 YouTubers accounts were frozen - YouTube wouldn't likely see a drop in total videos watched, people would watch something else.
qwerty456127 5y ago
Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries. For many no access to Facebook means loosing connection to everything including services essential for their offline life. Even in a very developed EU country I already happen to face cases when something is only available via Facebook because some companies don't bother having their own websites/emails/phones (often on purpose - to improve their Facebook rank). This is a very serious problem - hyper-centalization in hands of one corporation which can fail you intentionally or not. Facebook is becoming sort of the Chinese system (AFAIK standard WWW is almost nonexistent in China, they mostly use apps within social networks which are easier for the government to control) for the whole world. Looking more broadly it's another layer of the malicious trend to wrap the things in more and more layers. First we had native desktop apps (which always could communicate data to network servers). Then we have wrapped the apps in the browser (which essentially is an OS on an OS) but we had our pages on independent servers. Then we invented "social networks" and are putting everything in there. We could just improve desktop apps tech (including discoverability, delivery, interoperability, portability and UI design flexibility) but we chose the browsers. We could stop here, use the standard WWW and improve experience of using RSS/Atom/RDF/XMPP/etc but we gave up our pages/subscriptions/contacts to Facebook.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  Maybe everyone should stop doing things because they are popular. I guess the definition of popularity is something embraced by a majority though.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  Yes. We know. Any ideas how to fix it?
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Improve web standards, build easier web publishing and subscription tooling (easy and pleasurable for non-IT people to use), create and propagate a desktop app toolkit at least as flexible and cros-platform as the web frontend stack is + a good cross-platform and preferably decentralized "app store". This would require a lot of effort somebody has to fund however. I would expect governments to fund this if they recognized the seriousness of the problem. Governments already start taking climate change more and more seriously, this (web) problem is the next we face. Perhaps if I were a person in the government in charge of this I would just pay the Qt company to make full (including the Qt Design Studio) modern Qt totally free for everybody to use (as HTML, CSS, JS and the browsers are) and keep developing it. It is more cross-platform and fast than Chrome, very powerful and is not limited to classic widgets but can also do any visually fancy stuff with ease. This way (after addressing the discoverability problem also) we could revert straight to the native app phase.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nomilk 5y ago
This could mean people get their news from facebook, but it could also imply that people get their frivolous entertainment from news sites.
netcan 5y ago
If FB went dark permanently, we would fully "recover" very quickly. Not many needs will be unmet for long. Whether people use FB for messaging, groups, news or whatnot... nine of these are scarce. This is obvious, but it's worth noting how different this is from most companies of comparable size. If Toyota go dark, the world makes fewer cars. It would take time and investment to recover the capacity. Whether FB is good or bad, it's interesting how unnecessary it is.
- krrw 5y ago
  I haven't used FB for months. I only found out about the "outage" and the "whistleblower" on Twitter. For messaging I have switched back to (encrypted) email. Facebook is not just useless, it is also full of crap. Their apps are always asking for updates almost on a daily basis, and that's about 100MEGABYTES per update, just to solve "tiny errors" and insert unnecessary features. There has also been that frequent news of data leaks but Facebook was never held accountable for it. And they do not even tell affected users about it. Messenger and Instagram are not safe for kids either. Letting minors use such apps make them prone to harmful content. And you cannot even do anything about it. Their report button is useless.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > If Toyota go dark, the world makes fewer cars. It would take time and investment to recover the capacity. I think the world would be just fine - car manufacturing capacity has already dropped due to the chip shortage, but the world is humming along, albeit with slightly higher car prices. If Toyota became insolvent, second-hand Toyotas would go up in price, and some other car company would buy their factories. It wouldn't be Armageddon.
  - netcan 5y ago
    True. I didn't say armageddon. I said fewer cars for a while.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eterevsky 5y ago
I'll fix this: *When Facebook went down, traffic to all other sites went up
oytis 5y ago
News websites are alternative mindless scrolling devices, so when the main one goes down, people turn to what's available.
oconnor663 5y ago
Traffic to everything went up. HN itself had some service degradation as a result.
axegon_ 5y ago
Some food for thought: As much as correlation != causation(in regards to the spike in traffic), I've witnessed so many people taking any Facebook post as the ultimate source of truth. Which is insanely problematic in countries like mine, where "Facebook = real news" by all definitions. And as a consequence this has been the root cause of insane amounts of horror stories. For instance one of the lowest covid vaccination rates in the world(despite being among the first countries that made vaccination available to the general public beyond medical staff and risk groups). About a week ago a political leader stated on TV that she's been aware of a scandal involving a presidential candidate, who was contacted by his friend and immediately called the studio to confront those statements. When the presenter asked her where she got that information her response was: "I read it on the internet". I feel like Carlin's famous "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups" sentence is just that: Facebook became the official platform and facilitated the creation of large communities of the loonies that used to be standing on a cardboard box with a tin-foil hat at the main square shouting about reptilians and all that. The problem is that people are far less likely to listen to someone who hasn't taken a shower in weeks and smells of cigarettes and alcohol than a webcam-selfie in a soviet-green room next to a facebook post. Some weeks ago I saw an article about a website filled with fake news and out of curiosity I decided to investigate it. Turns out it's run by a guy in his early 20's, his mom and his mom's boyfriend or something. And it wasn't just that website: it turned out to be an absolute empire of hundreds websites like the one with thousands of articles and their main source of traffic was Facebook. And it's kind of evident when you see thousands of engagements on their posts in facebook while a news site which I can guarantee that is not biased or controlled by any political party or organization in any way(I am close to much of their staff) gets a couple of dozen likes at best. Facebook might not be the worst idea in human history but it somehow became the worst thing I've seen in my life. Tl;dr(enable sarcastic tone + slow clap): great job you're doing there to prevent misinformation Mr. Zuckerberg.
- ramoz 5y ago
  You're wrong to think this isnt a general problem with humans and how we process information. You're also wrong to think that Facebook is such a monster compared to media networks or other social media.
Threeve303 5y ago
Conveniently timed too with the whistleblower testifying at the same time.
tomhunters 5y ago
I do think that they're curious enough to search what caused the Facebook blackout this week. I do think that it's not only the news sites that went up but also other sites.
mxuribe 5y ago
Wait, what? Did you just say that Facebook went down? Hmm, funny that I didn't even notice. Life seemed to continue, and such a blip didn't lessen the quality of my life. By the way, yes, i do have a FB account, but no I do not check it much at all except for the rare "like" for a post from my mom, etc. Dang it, and now i exposed that my mom is on FB...there goes my ops sec! /s ;-)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hownottowrite 5y ago
So this is charting pageviews not sessions. Did those increase as well? I ask because we saw a net uptick in pageviews but sessions were much lower. The issue turned out to be Facebook code on our pages destroying page load times and we assume leading a rise in refreshes. Most news sites are littered with beacons so I imagine they had similar issues (times 10). As a small retailer, we probably ended up losing 15-20% of our sales that day.
no_wizard 5y ago
I’m sure it did, because everyone wanted to know why Facebook and related things was down, at least that’s my honest take, I don’t think it’s all that significant
rising-sky 5y ago
Perhaps to figure out why Facebook was down?
fennecfoxy 5y ago
What's the bet this is trying to imply without the veil of Facebook, people turned to news sources to enlighten themselves on the real world? Takes basic logic to realise that's not the case at all; people would've flocked to news sites to see why Facebook was down. Once it's back up they'll return to the bubble.
- FugeDaws 5y ago
  exactly this. This wasnt a huge awakening of people thinking "i must consume news" it was all to go see why facebook was down
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
FugeDaws 5y ago
I assume the influx in traffic was people heading to news sites to see why facebook was down rather than going to get actual news from actual news sources
8eye 5y ago
i bet porn sites saw an increase in traffic as well.
xtat 5y ago
How many of those visits were people trying to figure out what was going on with facebook? I bet most.

397 points by donohoe 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

imgabe 5y ago

Yeah, from people looking for news about why Facebook is down.

hansel_der 5y ago
and what they did after they found out

slackstation 5y ago

Traffic for basically every site went up. People thought it was an internet-wide DDOS attack when it was just the 3B people on FB's properties finding entertainment elsewhere.

BitAstronaut 5y ago
I'm pretty sure I saw reports that internet speed tests were going down as well from people checking their connections. I can't confirm it but if it's true, it's pretty interesting the chain reaction that occurred.
Guest19023892 5y ago
Were people finding entertainment elsewhere or simply opening news sites and Twitter to read why Facebook and Instagram were down?
- unicornporn 5y ago
  This.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  even fb/ig regulars should be able to find that information quickly so i guess they indeed did not "log off" after that.
tayo42 5y ago
traffic at my job was funny, it was chaos trying to handle it, then facebook came back and you can see it in the charts the drop in requests. it was a pretty quick return to normal. idk im surprised people just like didnt go do other things, like we just have to scroll?

treefry 5y ago

Traffic to Pornhub went up by 10%

aesyondu 5y ago
I thought you were kidding. Link for reference: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2021 https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...

the_70x 5y ago

Makes me thing the possibilities of social media governing the news feeds by algorithms. Is not good in any way

cblconfederate 5y ago

How can one take their website off facebook (i.e. disallow linking altogether?).

blowski 5y ago
You can’t, if they’re simple unauthenticated HTTP links then you can’t stop that link being copied and pasted. I guess you could look for Facebook’s spiders retrieving content and block those requests. But why bother?
shakna 5y ago
Pinterest allows you to block being pinned with: <meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" description="Sorry, but no. No pinning." /> However, I believe that they are the only social media site (that I can find), that supports that kind of behaviour.

crypt1d 5y ago

News sites traffic surge can be explained by people trying to figure out why FB/Instagram are not working. What's more interesting for me is that Pornhub's traffic surged by 10% [1] during the outage ;) [1] - https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2021 https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...

oarabbus_ 5y ago

I for one am not surprised that when one of the top 3 most-visited-domains in the world goes down, other sites are visited more often, in particular news sites.

eminence32 5y ago
I am also not surprised, though I'm not sure I would have guessed the increase in traffic to other sites would be this large (38%). It's always nice, though, to see data that confirms your intuition.
- dylan604 5y ago
  The non-tech public wouldn't know where to go to look, so the newsies seems logical.
  - lugged 5y ago
    Its "why is Facebook down" questions and looking it up on newssites.
    - alex_young 5y ago
      Seems like a plausible idea. I can think of some others. Why is this one more likely?
    - Griffinsauce 5y ago
      That is an assumption. It could also just be looking for their content fix.
      - GuySake 5y ago
        Well ... maybe that's a small proof. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=facebook,facebook%20down https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=facebook,facebook...
5y ago

luxuryballs 5y ago

awesome this is exactly what I was looking to find out that day, clearly it was obvious it would happen but I wanted to see the data

bluesmoon 5y ago

How much of the increase was due to reloads since when facebook goes down, the performance of sites that include FB javascript tends to get worse. For example, see https://www.akamai.com/blog/news/the-impact-of-third-party-scripts-on-the-facebook-outage https://www.akamai.com/blog/news/the-impact-of-third-party-s... and https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1445244384598011906 https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1445244384598011906

newsbinator 5y ago

I immediately went to a news site to see if there was news about Whatsapp being down

marketingtech 5y ago

And non-Amazon ecommerce sales (*according to one major third-party warehouse company) went down 27%. https://twitter.com/AaronandML/status/1445162492909531137 https://twitter.com/AaronandML/status/1445162492909531137

HenryKissinger 5y ago
I (don't) like how online retail is now either "Amazon" or "non-Amazon".
- rob74 5y ago
  On one hand, it's worrying that Amazon is so huge that we have these two categories; on the other hand we should be glad that there still is some "non-Amazon" left...
  - hnbad 5y ago
    This assumes it's in Amazon's interest for there not to be. Theoretically all companies under capitalism would want to become true monopolies because having competition means leaving money on the table, but in practice a duopoly or a de facto monopoly is preferable to skirt regulations and interventions. There is a good reason Google still props up Mozilla despite competing with them in the browser space. It would also be interesting so see how many of the larger non-Amazons run on AWS.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It's payment safety. There are many sites I want to buy off of, but just don't trust them with my banking info. And yes--I know many websites accept Paypal. Amazon is just ease of mind with the negative of counterfeit products. (I think I'm hellbanned again, but don't really care.)
- herbst 5y ago
  If Amazon ever tries to get into Switzerland again we are getting the pitchforks out. It's so nice to have hundreds of small online shops actually competing with quality and or cheap products. Instead of a AliExpress clone with worse support.

TedShiller 5y ago

When Facebook went down this week, the world was a better place

cblconfederate 5y ago
The internet was a better place. FB is such a big time sink that it chokes almost everything else except the 3-4 huge outliers.

oblib 5y ago

What cracked me up about this is how many "FB Friends" of mine think FB did it on purpose. "They were erasing data" is one the theories I was told.

deleted 5y ago
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a-dub 5y ago
THE SINGULARITY HAPPENED IN FB'S AI RESEARCH GROUPS, IT WAS A LAST DITCH EFFORT TO PREVENT IT FROM ESCAPING!
- kongin 5y ago
  I'd read a short story about it.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Do you remember what story it was?
inb4_cancelled 5y ago
"They were erasing data" is afaik the current Qanon explanation after they slowly realized this wasn't the "ten days of darkness".
hnbad 5y ago
I find that the type of person who thinks FB did this intentionally (either to "erase data" or as a distraction) vastly overestimates the impact of whistleblowers. There have been ex-FB employees publicly accusing the company of enabling foreign political interference in the US, lynching mobs forming via WhatsApp, governments spreading misinformation, not to mention gross privacy abuses by its own employees. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Heck, nothing fundamentally changed after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video (in fact, there have now been reports that the supposed retaliatory precision strike in Afghanistan actually killed an aid worker and his children and this too changes nothing) and nothing fundamentally changed after the Snowden leaks. Obama literally went on public television and admitted to torture and nothing fundamentally changed. As much as us nerds tend to think otherwise, information on its own changes nothing. Scandals like this are just another piece of outrage fuel to be consumed on social media and to be liked, shared and subscribed to. Without actually organizing and defining solutions rather than just the problems, nothing fundamentally changes. Otherwise the best you can hope for is the POTUS reading off a script while making a concerned face or Congress passing a toothless bill before things return to normal.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

I remember when my town lost power for a week. It was glorious. People started talking to their neighbours, kids started playing outside. Magic. Does Facebook really make anyone's life better? Sometimes I wish I born before the internet, or even a century ago.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
I wish I was born at a time so that I'd be able to experience the early internet. And then die of natural causes, so that I didn't have to live through the hell that is the internet today. (A bit dramatic - it's meant to be satiric).
elvischidera 5y ago
I mean, if you really want it today, there are places in the world you could go to that have little to no internet access. Where people still communicate mostly in-person. (I'm only half joking haha). > Does Facebook really make anyone's life better? I can only answer for myself. It made my life better: 1. At the start of my career, I got connections, jobs, etc from local groups. 2. I connected with old school mates I wouldn't have found other wise. 3. ... My assumption is when people are not addicted or living/following fake lives on social media, there is a lot of benefits to it.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
You could move somewhere like Pitcairn Island, it’s actively looking for immigrants or at least it was last time I checked. There’s other isolated island communities out there which are a bit less extreme too with limited access to the internet. Saint Helena would be an example, although I’m not sure what the immigration requirements are. You could also get into sailing, specifically offshore cruising. Until Starlink becomes available for mobile installations your options are either ruinously expensive and slow satellite internet or if you’re a radio amateur shortwave services for email and SSB voice.

lowlevel 5y ago

I don't know about you guys, but I only went to the news to find out what happened to facebook.

asutekku 5y ago

We saw an increase in traffic in all of our portfolio's mobile games so instead of "News sites saw more traffic because of Facebook was down" it was "People did something else than browse Facebook while Facebook was down".

3np 5y ago
I'd wager so did HN and Pornhub. I don't think there's that much to news specifically, even if some love to push a certain narrative there.
- inanutshellus 5y ago
  For sure HN did; it was struggling to stay up from the load. Several threads were suggesting logging out -- which would let HN load static content -- to help it load, for example.
a-dub 5y ago
this seems right to me. would love to see a real analysis of what sort of traffic news sites saw. my hunch is, yeah, maybe people had a look to see if the news confirmed their suspicions... but then maybe stayed a while and/or sought out alternatives for the ultimate distraction contraption.
nothis 5y ago
Still a good thing.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Its not a 'good' thing or a 'bad' thing, its just basic logic. Same as saying people who wanted to go to the park did something else instead because the park was closed. Its not good or bad. It just 'is'.
tyingq 5y ago
Well, and also, people probably googled "is facebook down", and clicked on the various carousel news stories.

oefrha 5y ago

I wonder what kind of percentage increase in traffic YouTube and TikTok saw during the Facebook and Instagram outage.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

And this is what's motivating the establishment's campaign against social media. Many people think that information should go through gatekeepers - that people shouldn't be able to share information peer-to-peer without filters. The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook. And the claims are all disingenuous nonsense. The Facebook "whistleblower" for example explained how she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.

encryptluks2 5y ago
The Facebook whistleblower who wants more censorship and all the news sites made it such a big deal. It was all very convenient how things happened.
amelius 5y ago
The solution is to set FB's incentives right, which can be done by banning ads from social networks. With this solution, no other type of censoring is necessary.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Many people think that information should go through gatekeepers - that people shouldn't be able to share information peer-to-peer without filters. The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook" You think Facebook not a gatekeeper? You think it liberalized speech? 4chan is free speech, facebook just privatised hate
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Facebook is far less of a gatekeeper than traditional news media.

nickpp 5y ago

And now we understand why media hates FB so much: they compete for the same attention.

cmckn 5y ago

“The twin towers went down this week and traffic to news sites went up”

helb 5y ago

If anyone else is wondering what that "dark social" in the chart is: > […] social shares that do not contain any digital referral information about the source. > In contrary to the sharing on social networking service like Facebook, which is done publicly, Dark social is done privately through IRC channels, emails, SMS or simply copy-and-paste and other ways of private sharing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_social_media)

hnbad 5y ago
That's an amazingly sinister term to describe what was the norm prior to the rise of Google Analytics and its equivalents.
- resonious 5y ago
  I thought the same thing. It seems like marketers really hate it though. > To combat this lack of transparency, websites can include more attractive ways to share links than simply copy-pasting into another application; ... I guess one man's privacy is another man's "lack of transparency".
  - gjvnq 5y ago
    > I guess one man's privacy is another man's "lack of transparency". A good example of this are jobs that post your salary online. Those are usually in government and some NGOs. Interestingly, some Nordic countries allow people to see each others income tax info.

Teknoman117 5y ago

I was actually quite happy when I heard about the outage. I’ve managed to disconnect myself from Facebook’s services sufficiently that I didn’t even notice they were down...

herbst 5y ago
Same here. I thought Cloudflare is having issues as the whole internet appeared slow that day. I only read that FB is down on hacker news hours later.

jnsaff2 5y ago

"Twitter would have literally exploded" the site went blank mid sentence, was there anything of note afterwards? /s

pantulis 5y ago

Did any other third party site stop working because the FB tracking codes started failing? Or mobile apps for that matter using FB's SDK.

giords 5y ago

Well, I guess most of the people wanted to know what was going on... with Facebook. And waste time somewhere else. It's interesting anyways to see proof that most people likely didn't use the extra free time to stay off the internet. We truly are internet junkies.

Eric-J 5y ago

the really news sites calculating on your finger hand, as the rest news sites it like culture sites.

muppetman 5y ago

Same as when any other perceived disaster strikes, news traffic spikes so people can learn more about the disaster. (Cue the pile on of "But this wasn't a real disaster", sure. But unfortunately for a lot of people, it really was. They couldn't communicate with loved ones etc.) How is this a surprise?

squiggleblaz 5y ago
If you wanted, you could call it a major disruption. I don't know exactly what makes an event a "real disaster", but I agree that suddenly being isolated from your family is a significant event, and if anyone wanted to belittle your characterisation, they should probably recallibrate their understanding of the world. (And they should also be careful to distinguish their oughts and their is-es.)
serial_dev 5y ago
There are many possible explanations for this outcome, and probably all of them played some role in this, though it's hard for me to tell which one is the most important. One factor is that people wanted to know how this whole outage evolves (your example). It's similar to a "disaster", so people want to know the latest updates. It's not a surprise, but it might not explain the whole picture. Another factor is that Facebook (when it's up) has a negative effect on most news site's traffic. People might find your news article on Facebook, but most of the time, they just skim the title, and read the comments on Facebook, and they don't bother visiting your website (or they don't stay there and browse the rest of the articles). This could be interesting for you if you've been following the love-hate relationship that news websites and Facebook have been having for almost a decade now.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

It's a good reminder in humility to any of us making services or products of any kind that however many happy users and great reviews we have, if the service disappears people will use something else. If I go to hacker news whilst procrastination lock out is on I curse and go to another news site. If the top 10 YouTubers accounts were frozen - YouTube wouldn't likely see a drop in total videos watched, people would watch something else.

qwerty456127 5y ago

Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries. For many no access to Facebook means loosing connection to everything including services essential for their offline life. Even in a very developed EU country I already happen to face cases when something is only available via Facebook because some companies don't bother having their own websites/emails/phones (often on purpose - to improve their Facebook rank). This is a very serious problem - hyper-centalization in hands of one corporation which can fail you intentionally or not. Facebook is becoming sort of the Chinese system (AFAIK standard WWW is almost nonexistent in China, they mostly use apps within social networks which are easier for the government to control) for the whole world. Looking more broadly it's another layer of the malicious trend to wrap the things in more and more layers. First we had native desktop apps (which always could communicate data to network servers). Then we have wrapped the apps in the browser (which essentially is an OS on an OS) but we had our pages on independent servers. Then we invented "social networks" and are putting everything in there. We could just improve desktop apps tech (including discoverability, delivery, interoperability, portability and UI design flexibility) but we chose the browsers. We could stop here, use the standard WWW and improve experience of using RSS/Atom/RDF/XMPP/etc but we gave up our pages/subscriptions/contacts to Facebook.

suifbwish 5y ago
Maybe everyone should stop doing things because they are popular. I guess the definition of popularity is something embraced by a majority though.
pmlnr 5y ago
Yes. We know. Any ideas how to fix it?
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Improve web standards, build easier web publishing and subscription tooling (easy and pleasurable for non-IT people to use), create and propagate a desktop app toolkit at least as flexible and cros-platform as the web frontend stack is + a good cross-platform and preferably decentralized "app store". This would require a lot of effort somebody has to fund however. I would expect governments to fund this if they recognized the seriousness of the problem. Governments already start taking climate change more and more seriously, this (web) problem is the next we face. Perhaps if I were a person in the government in charge of this I would just pay the Qt company to make full (including the Qt Design Studio) modern Qt totally free for everybody to use (as HTML, CSS, JS and the browsers are) and keep developing it. It is more cross-platform and fast than Chrome, very powerful and is not limited to classic widgets but can also do any visually fancy stuff with ease. This way (after addressing the discoverability problem also) we could revert straight to the native app phase.

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nomilk 5y ago

This could mean people get their news from facebook, but it could also imply that people get their frivolous entertainment from news sites.

netcan 5y ago

If FB went dark permanently, we would fully "recover" very quickly. Not many needs will be unmet for long. Whether people use FB for messaging, groups, news or whatnot... nine of these are scarce. This is obvious, but it's worth noting how different this is from most companies of comparable size. If Toyota go dark, the world makes fewer cars. It would take time and investment to recover the capacity. Whether FB is good or bad, it's interesting how unnecessary it is.

krrw 5y ago
I haven't used FB for months. I only found out about the "outage" and the "whistleblower" on Twitter. For messaging I have switched back to (encrypted) email. Facebook is not just useless, it is also full of crap. Their apps are always asking for updates almost on a daily basis, and that's about 100MEGABYTES per update, just to solve "tiny errors" and insert unnecessary features. There has also been that frequent news of data leaks but Facebook was never held accountable for it. And they do not even tell affected users about it. Messenger and Instagram are not safe for kids either. Letting minors use such apps make them prone to harmful content. And you cannot even do anything about it. Their report button is useless.
sangnoir 5y ago
> If Toyota go dark, the world makes fewer cars. It would take time and investment to recover the capacity. I think the world would be just fine - car manufacturing capacity has already dropped due to the chip shortage, but the world is humming along, albeit with slightly higher car prices. If Toyota became insolvent, second-hand Toyotas would go up in price, and some other car company would buy their factories. It wouldn't be Armageddon.
- netcan 5y ago
  True. I didn't say armageddon. I said fewer cars for a while.

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eterevsky 5y ago

I'll fix this: *When Facebook went down, traffic to all other sites went up

oytis 5y ago

News websites are alternative mindless scrolling devices, so when the main one goes down, people turn to what's available.

oconnor663 5y ago

Traffic to everything went up. HN itself had some service degradation as a result.

axegon_ 5y ago

Some food for thought: As much as correlation != causation(in regards to the spike in traffic), I've witnessed so many people taking any Facebook post as the ultimate source of truth. Which is insanely problematic in countries like mine, where "Facebook = real news" by all definitions. And as a consequence this has been the root cause of insane amounts of horror stories. For instance one of the lowest covid vaccination rates in the world(despite being among the first countries that made vaccination available to the general public beyond medical staff and risk groups). About a week ago a political leader stated on TV that she's been aware of a scandal involving a presidential candidate, who was contacted by his friend and immediately called the studio to confront those statements. When the presenter asked her where she got that information her response was: "I read it on the internet". I feel like Carlin's famous "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups" sentence is just that: Facebook became the official platform and facilitated the creation of large communities of the loonies that used to be standing on a cardboard box with a tin-foil hat at the main square shouting about reptilians and all that. The problem is that people are far less likely to listen to someone who hasn't taken a shower in weeks and smells of cigarettes and alcohol than a webcam-selfie in a soviet-green room next to a facebook post. Some weeks ago I saw an article about a website filled with fake news and out of curiosity I decided to investigate it. Turns out it's run by a guy in his early 20's, his mom and his mom's boyfriend or something. And it wasn't just that website: it turned out to be an absolute empire of hundreds websites like the one with thousands of articles and their main source of traffic was Facebook. And it's kind of evident when you see thousands of engagements on their posts in facebook while a news site which I can guarantee that is not biased or controlled by any political party or organization in any way(I am close to much of their staff) gets a couple of dozen likes at best. Facebook might not be the worst idea in human history but it somehow became the worst thing I've seen in my life. Tl;dr(enable sarcastic tone + slow clap): great job you're doing there to prevent misinformation Mr. Zuckerberg.

ramoz 5y ago
You're wrong to think this isnt a general problem with humans and how we process information. You're also wrong to think that Facebook is such a monster compared to media networks or other social media.

Threeve303 5y ago

Conveniently timed too with the whistleblower testifying at the same time.

tomhunters 5y ago

I do think that they're curious enough to search what caused the Facebook blackout this week. I do think that it's not only the news sites that went up but also other sites.

mxuribe 5y ago

Wait, what? Did you just say that Facebook went down? Hmm, funny that I didn't even notice. Life seemed to continue, and such a blip didn't lessen the quality of my life. By the way, yes, i do have a FB account, but no I do not check it much at all except for the rare "like" for a post from my mom, etc. Dang it, and now i exposed that my mom is on FB...there goes my ops sec! /s ;-)

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hownottowrite 5y ago

So this is charting pageviews not sessions. Did those increase as well? I ask because we saw a net uptick in pageviews but sessions were much lower. The issue turned out to be Facebook code on our pages destroying page load times and we assume leading a rise in refreshes. Most news sites are littered with beacons so I imagine they had similar issues (times 10). As a small retailer, we probably ended up losing 15-20% of our sales that day.

no_wizard 5y ago

I’m sure it did, because everyone wanted to know why Facebook and related things was down, at least that’s my honest take, I don’t think it’s all that significant

rising-sky 5y ago

Perhaps to figure out why Facebook was down?

fennecfoxy 5y ago

What's the bet this is trying to imply without the veil of Facebook, people turned to news sources to enlighten themselves on the real world? Takes basic logic to realise that's not the case at all; people would've flocked to news sites to see why Facebook was down. Once it's back up they'll return to the bubble.

FugeDaws 5y ago
exactly this. This wasnt a huge awakening of people thinking "i must consume news" it was all to go see why facebook was down

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FugeDaws 5y ago

I assume the influx in traffic was people heading to news sites to see why facebook was down rather than going to get actual news from actual news sources

8eye 5y ago

i bet porn sites saw an increase in traffic as well.

xtat 5y ago

How many of those visits were people trying to figure out what was going on with facebook? I bet most.