What do you do when your favorite cat-stalking platform is down? For many, it's a good opportunity to engage in a bit of self-love.
Last Tuesday, YouTube broke down and – naturally – everybody flipped out.
The platform was back up and running in under two hours, but that was not before another website noticed an unusual surge in activity.
Pornhub released data showing an influx of traffic that day, starting at roughly 9pm (ET) when people first started to notice YouTube's technical difficulties. Traffic peaked at 10pm (ET) with levels 21 percent above normal.
That, Pornhub told Mashable, is "a significant increase by millions of additional viewers during Pornhub’s peak evening hours."
Then, at around 11pm (ET), traffic suspiciously plummeted, dropping below normal levels for that time of day. Oh yeah, by this time YouTube's service had been restored. Cleary, everybody decided it was time to return to videos of puppy baths and Fortnite fails.
But traffic numbers weren't the only unusual find. There was also a curious change in what people were searching for, with searches for "fortnite" rising by 109 percent, "minecraft" by 96 percent, "game" by 92 percent, and (bizarrely) "youtube" by 183 percent.
Searches for "ASMR", which stands for autonomous sensory meridian response – aka the "distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli", more than doubled (201 percent) when YouTube was down. This, Pornhub says, might be because you are just as likely to find ASMR videos on Pornhub as you are on YouTube.
It is not the first time Pornhub has released data showing unusual spikes in activity triggered by global events. In the past, they've revealed the Internet's masturbatory habits during the World Cup, Royal Wedding, and even the false missile alert in Hawaii earlier this year.
One of their most peculiar finds was an 8,000 percent increase in searches for Bigfoot erotica after Republican Nominee Denver Riggleman's Instagram post went viral.
[H/T: Mashable]