Last Wednesday, April 11, the servers for Fortnite: Battle Royale experienced an extended outage. A database issue forced Epic Games to take the game’s servers down completely for maintenance.
Gamers both hardcore and casual didn’t know what to do with their time while they waited for their favorite game to return. And so large numbers of them apparently decided to follow their love for Fortnite in another way—by searching for Fortnite porn, according to PornHub.
When the outage began, a spike in searches for “Fortnite” on PornHub began to increase at a rapid rate, as the above graph depicts. At about 5am on April 12, it peaked at about a 60 percent increase in normal search volume.
Not only that, but PornHub traffic from gamers in general increased by a lot over the course of a 24-hour period thanks to the server downtime. It seems like since players were unable to enjoy the game, they had turned to porn instead.
“Using ‘affinity’ data provided by Google Analytics, our statisticians were able to view traffic changes from visitors who are interested in video games,” PornHub said. “We found that traffic from ‘gaming fans’ increased shortly after the server outage began, and remained higher than normal over the entire 24 hour period. Gamer traffic was 9.8 percent above average just 3 hours before server access resumed, after which traffic dropped below normal levels.”
Hilariously, once the outage ended and the Fortnite servers came back up, the search volume for the term began to fall. As players were chasing Victory Royales once again, the need for Fortnite porn had decreased back to “normal.”
