It’s no secret that Silicon Valley has monopolized our time: The average adult spends 24 hours per week online. It’s tempting to imagine what we might do with that time if we weren’t thumbing through Facebook photos, retweeting GIFs, or spiraling down YouTube rabbit holes. Turns out we can get a glimpse into that alternative reality from a rare online event—website outages caused by technical problems. What happens when Instagram glitches or Slack stalls, and we snap out of our Very Online existence? Spoiler: Research shows that we don’t log off. We just scurry off to different (sometimes darker) corners of the web.
On August 3, 2018, Facebook went offline for about 45 minutes. Seconds after the platform malfunctioned, users clicked over to news outlets. In an analysis of more than 4,000 publishers’ sites, direct traffic increased 11 percent during Facebook’s lapse, while traffic to news mobile apps ballooned 22 percent.
When YouTube went dark for about an hour and 30 minutes on October 16, 2018, news sites saw a 20 percent rise in traffic. But nearly half of that jump was driven by people searching for stories about what the heck was wrong with YouTube.
During YouTube’s brief glitch this fall, Pornhub also reaped the rewards: Traffic to the porn site surged 21 percent. Many of those visitors searched the X-rated video platform for search terms more commonly associated with YouTube.
A server issue caused Fortnite, the most popular videogame in the world, to go down for nearly 24 hours on April 11, 2018. According to Google Analytics, an abnormal number of those identified as “gaming fans” clicked over to Pornhub shortly after the outage began.
Google and its sister services, like Google Docs and Gmail, rarely crash. But on August 16, 2013, the site went down for less than five minutes—and took the rest of the web with it as users went offline entirely.
When the instant (incessant) messaging platform Slack went offline for more than three hours on June 27, 2018, time management tracker RescueTime found that users pivoted to other platforms for work—and procrastination. Though time spent on Google Hangouts and email spiked, so did social media use.
Some platforms stumble into technical snags more frequently than others.
When major sites go down, people panic—and even call 911. Authorities tweet back.
“#Facebook is not a law Enforcement issue, please don’t call us about it being down!”
“Yes, FB & Insta are down. No, we can’t arrest anyone.”
“Folks please do not call the police because #facebookdown we are as upset as you are but we cannot fix facebook. #sorry #wetried #techpolice”
“We will move mountains to help those in our community, however we can’t fix Facebook so please don’t call 911 to ‘let us know it’s down.’”
Louise Matsakis (@lmatsakis) is a WIRED staff writer covering security. Additional reporting by Rebecca Heilweil.
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