Facebook's downtime had a really big impact on overall traffic

Aug 5, 2014 08:25 GMT  ·  By
Facebook's outage has an interesting impact on overall Internet traffic
3 photos
   Facebook's outage has an interesting impact on overall Internet traffic

Do you remember that the world stopped spinning last Friday? No? Well, that’s probably because it was only Facebook taking a half hour break from working.

Well, during the “major” outage that Facebook went through on Friday, when the world rediscovered Twitter only to complain about their favorite social network being down, overall traffic on news sites dropped by 3 percent. Aside from this, it should once more be said that people in LA called the cops because Facebook was down.

According to Chartbeat, the fact that Facebook dropped off the face of the Earth for half an hour provided the chance for a natural experiment on how the world of web traffic would look like without Facebook.

The results were pretty impressive. First of all, it looks like Facebook generates a tiny portion of “dark social” traffic. This is traffic to articles that lack a referrer because it comes via apps or even secure connections such as HTTPS.

It has always been a mystery just how much of this traffic comes from Facebook, given the network’s huge size and the large number of users logging in each day. It is already known that Facebook makes up a huge portion of non-dark traffic, but the outage gave people a chance to see how the social network fared on the dark side.

Well, very little of this dark social traffic came from Facebook. While Facebook referrals dropped by almost 70 percent during the outage, only about 16 percent of the dark social traffic could have been directly attributed to Facebook.

“Now, of course, we’d expect some other social sharing might be negatively impacted — if people aren’t discovering articles on Facebook, they might not be sharing them in other ways. So, that doesn’t mean that 16% of dark social traffic is from Facebook, but it does provide strong evidence that 84% of dark social traffic is something other than Facebook traffic in disguise,” the blog post reads.

Mobile traffic on sites was down 8.5 percent when comparing the minute before the outage to the lower point while Facebook was down. On desktops, things were a bit different, as there was a 3.5 percent increase in desktop traffic after the start of the outage.

The increase was actually fueled by a 9 percent rise in homepage direct traffic on sites with loyal homepage followings. This basically means that people were going to homepages rather than following links posted on Facebook, which is something that most people don't do anymore.

No one can say with total certainty that Facebook is responsible for these drops, but it is unlikely that they happened because of other reasons.

Facebook's impact on online traffic (3 Images)

Facebook's outage has an interesting impact on overall Internet traffic
Facebook and the desktop direct traffic spikeFacebook and the dark social traffic
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