'Fortnite' Goes Down, Prompting Pornhub's Hilarious Response
Pornhub continues to prove that it's really good at data.
Don’t panic, but Fortnite: Battle Royale servers were taken offline late Wednesday night for “emergency maintenance” following the version 3.5 update earlier in the day. Thankfully, Pornhub was ready to make jokes over Twitter about how a phenomenon like this usually results in surges of porn traffic on the site.
The data team behind Pornhub, which is one of the internet’s biggest porn sites, does a great job analyzing how cultural events influence porn viewership — like how the Hawaii missile false alarm in January resulted in a huge spike in porn activity for the entire state. Pornhub’s latest joke assumes that because Fortnite servers are down, the website is bound to get a huge surge in traffic. How else will these gamers occupy their time? For PlayStation 4 Fortnite players, they don’t have the luxury of playing PUBG instead, so porn might be their only solace.
Specifically, Pornhub jokes that the traffic spike might just crash their servers next.
Gamers do have a rabid history with their porn searches on Pornhub. Their Insights team regularly offers information on video game-related searches, with games like Overwatch, Minecraft, and even Pokémon.
Back in March, Pornhub even began tracking Fortnite-specific porn traffic at the request of Polygon. Regardless of server status, Fortnite porn search queries have increased drastically as the game grew in popularity, with the greatest increase happening after [Drake streamed the game with Twitch celebrity Ninja.
'Fortnite'-related porn searches are increasing exponentially.
It’s doubtful that Pornhub’s servers would actually go down from a traffic spike, yet it’s also probably that embittered Fortnite players did actually turn to Pornhub while servers were down.
As of 2:10 a.m. Eastern, Fortnite servers are still down, and you can check ongoing updates of the game’s status right here. So we’re left to wonder exactly how this could possibly influence traffic over on Pornhub. Here’s to hoping their Insights team has something else to say about the matter soon.
