Pornhub's site traffic surged after YouTube went down

In one of those strange twists of fate, online adult video site Pornhub saw a surge in traffic during Tuesday night's YouTube outage, perhaps answering the riddle of what America watches when they can't access old wrestling videos or Beyoncé clips.

According to data released by Pornhub, the site saw a wave of additional traffic late Tuesday evening. Traffic surged to 12 percent above normal at around 9 p.m. ET, when the outage was widely reported, climaxing with a 21 percent increase over normal traffic around 10 p.m. ET.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Traffic dropped precipitously once YouTube's service was restored, dropping to slightly below average numbers around midnight while the world watched videos of squirrels water skiing or dogs skateboarding to remind themselves that, yes, we are alive.

According to Pornhub, that's "a significant increase by millions of additional viewers during Pornhub’s peak evening hours."

Below you can see the top search terms from that window, as well.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Whether or not that spike was solely caused by YouTube's outage isn't known; it might be a case where correlation doesn't equal causation. Still, given the dark times we live in, it's not out of the question to assume that people used that outage to take a break from Jake Paul documentaries and let their hair down just a little.