Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) had a major outage midday on Friday that lasted for nearly half an hour. The world’s favorite social network being down for even half an hour created a furor among the users, who went to Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) to express their frustration. Data analytics’ website Chartbeat saw an opportunity in Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s outage to analyze how does Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) being down for sometimes affect the web traffic, they published the results of this “natural experiment” on their blog.
According to Chartbeat’s analysis, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s outage didn’t significantly affected the traffic to the articles that lacks a referrer because it comes via HTTPS or apps, better known as ‘dark social’ traffic. The ‘dark social’ traffic was only 11% higher than at its low point during the outage, which means that the majority of this traffic comes from other places than Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) or Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB).
A lot of mobile traffic comes from Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), which was vindicated by the outage when entrances to sites on mobile devices dropped by 8.5% from the minute before the outage to the lowest point while Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) was down. The interesting thing that came out of the experiment was, though the mobile traffic witnessed a decline, desktop traffic saw an increase of 3.5% during the same period of time. According to Chartbeat’s analysis that spurt in desktop traffic came from a 9% increase in homepage direct traffic on sites with loyal homepage followings and other referrers like Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) or Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Google News had no role to play in it.
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