Epic Games’ Fortnite Server Outage Leads to Increase in Fortnite Porn Searches
Last Wednesday, April 11, the servers for Fortnite: Battle Royale experienced a prolonged downtime due to a database issue. This forced Epic Games to completely shut down the game’s servers for maintenance.
Gamers, both hardcore and casual, were left without their favorite game and didn’t know what to do during this time. Surprisingly, many of them turned to their love for Fortnite in a different way—by searching for Fortnite porn, as revealed by PornHub.
As depicted in the graph above, when the outage started there was a significant spike in searches for “Fortnite” on PornHub. The search volume reached a peak of about 60 percent above normal at around 5am on April 12.
Not only that, but PornHub also experienced a significant increase in traffic from gamers in general throughout the 24-hour period of server downtime. It seems that since players were unable to enjoy the game, they turned to porn instead.
“Using ‘affinity’ data provided by Google Analytics, our statisticians were able to observe changes in traffic from visitors who are interested in video games,” stated PornHub. “We discovered that traffic from ‘gaming fans’ increased shortly after the server outage began and remained above average for the entire 24-hour period. Three hours before server access was restored, gamer traffic peaked at 9.8 percent above average and then dropped back to normal levels.”
Interestingly, once the Fortnite server outage ended and the game was accessible again, the search volume for Fortnite porn started to decline. As players returned to chasing Victory Royales, the demand for Fortnite porn decreased back to normal levels.