Pornhub traffic spikes as Zoom goes down

Adult entertainment venture Pornhub says that activity spiked on its platform when Zoom went down earlier this week.

The video streaming app has seen a surge of popularity in recent months as the coronavirus crisis forced many people to work remotely and rely on video calling to keep in touch with colleagues and clients.

According to Down Detector, Zoom users began reporting issues just before 9am UK time on Monday (4am NYC time). The majority of people complained about problems with logging in and video-conferencing.

The outage affected North America and some parts of Europe.

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“While some people simply switched to a different video service for the day, Daily Caller asked us if many others used the downtime to visit Pornhub. And it turns out they did!” Pornhub said in a blog post.

“Traffic across the United Kingdom increased by as much at 5.6% at 11am, and the East Coast of the US by 6.2%. When you consider that the US and UK make up nearly half of Pornhub’s daily traffic, that represents a major shift in mid-day porn viewership.”

This wasn’t the first time that the venture benefitted from an outage. In March 2019, both Facebook and Instagram were down for several hours, leading to a 19% surge in traffic to Pornhub.