Facebook Outage Points to Importance of ‘Dark Social’

IMs, emails and office conversations also drive visitors to websites

Depending on which metrics one considers, the two-hour Facebook outage on Aug. 1 signaled a potential disaster for other websites or survivable inconvenience.

With a tweet (see below), Chartbeat chief data scientist Josh Schwartz demonstrated that news websites saw traffic drop by a total 3 percent during the outage. Much of the temporary decline can be attributed to people’s inability to share and clickthrough links via Facebook’s smartphone app. A deeper analysis of social media referrals to all websites, however, painted a more complicated picture.

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