Social media users don't care much when Facebook goes down

Have you ever thought of the world without Facebook? On 3 August 2018, Facebook went down for 45 minutes and a sudden change in traffic patterns witnessed as the visitors switched to publishers' sites and mobile apps. That is good news for Internet news publishers as the users go for alternate ways to get their information fixed.

According to the traffic statistics worldwide, the content demand of the users is almost stable, means there is no big change noticed in the traffic.

Major changes noticed:

• A double-digit growth has been witnessed on mobile as compared to the desktop traffic.
• Since January 2017, Google search has been doubled while Facebook was down by about 40% on mobile.
• Traffic sent by Facebook to publishers is lesser than direct traffic on mobile. That is a significant sign that users prefer opening a link using direct URL instead of Facebook referrals.

The built-in mobile feed fetchers have changed the content discovery habits of the users significantly, while Yahoo, Twitter, and other traditional referrers have remained constant in driving the traffic. The news aggregator apps have continued to drive good traffic to publishers.

Related: How To Have The Best Internet Snow Day (infographic)

Along with the built-in apps in web browsers, the news apps owned by publishers are also making a clear difference in driving traffic. The popularity of news apps was increased by 40% in 2017 and the traffic driven through these sources seemed to be more loyal.

More interesting observations noted on August 3 incident.

What happened when Facebook was down?

Chartbeat has presented the analysis of the traffic data collected from over 4000 sites present key points witnessed.

• 22% increase in mobile apps' traffic while 11% increase in direct traffic to websites.
• Search referral traffic increased by 80%.
• A 2.3% increase in the total traffic.

An alarming situation for Facebook is that as soon as Facebook went down, the traffic was diverted to other sources within a second. It is really amazing to watch that consumers don't care that much when Facebook is out of the picture temporarily.