When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up

On October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for more than five hours. For five+ hours, people read news, according to Chartbeat data from its thousands of publisher clients across 60 countries. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. At the peak of the outage — around 3 p.m. ET — net traffic to pages across the web was up by 38% compared to the same time the previous week, Chartbeat found.