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    Oct. 7, 2021, 1:34 p.m.
    When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up
    LINK: twitter.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen   |   October 7, 2021

    On August 3, 2018, Facebook went down for 45 minutes. That’s a little baby outage compared to the one this week, when, on October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for more than five hours. Three years ago, the 45-minute Facebook break was enough to get people to go read news elsewhere, Chartbeat‘s Josh Schwartz wrote for us at the time.

    So what happened this time around? For a whopping five-hours-plus, people read news, according to data Chartbeat gave us this week from its thousands of publisher clients across 60 countries.. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. If Bad Art Friend had been published on the same day as the Facebook outage, Twitter would have literally exploded, presumably.)

    At the peak of the outage — around 3 p.m. ET — net traffic to pages across the web was up by 38% compared to the same time the previous week, Chartbeat found.

    By the way, here’s how Chartbeat defines direct traffic and dark social, from CMO Jill Nicholson.

    And here’s a question a bunch of people had. We’ll update this post when we know!

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