It’s tempting to imagine what we could do with our time if social media didn’t exist. We would be so much more productive, right? Lol, nope! Data shows that when a website goes down, we don’t log off. We just scurry to different corners of the web 1/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM
On August 3, 2018, Facebook went offline for about 45 minutes—within seconds users clicked over to news outlets. Direct traffic to publishers increased 11 percent during Facebook’s lapse, while traffic to news mobile apps ballooned 22 percent 2/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM 
When YouTube went dark for about an hour and a half on October 16, 2018, news sites saw a 20 percent rise in traffic. The ironic part? Nearly half of that jump was driven by people searching for stories about what the heck was wrong with YouTube 3/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM
News sites aren’t the only ones who benefited when YouTube went down this fall. Traffic to the porn site Pornhub surged 21 percent 4/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM
Porhub also reaped the rewards of a server issue that caused Fortnite to go down on April 11, 2018. Google Analytics shows that an abnormal number of those identified as “gaming fans” clicked over to the porn site shortly after the outage began 5/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM
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 6/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM
There’s nothing like a Slack outage to shake up the internet. When it went offline for more than three hours on June 27, 2018, users turned to Google Hangouts and email. The pivot wasn’t entirely work-related, though, social media use spiked, too 7/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM
When Slack goes down, you hear about it A LOT. But it’s less frequent than you think. These are the platforms who stumbled into technical snags the most in 2018. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have some work to do in 2019 8/ wired.trib.al/BgZ29yM
