Phone dialer usage up 75 times during Facebook outage
After Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down, people were forced to return to the old ways of connecting with each other. Indians either resorted to phone calls and SMS to talk to their family or friends, or they went to meet them in person. According to a report by artificial intelligence innovation start-up Bobble AI revealed that Indians chose to go back to traditional modes of communication to meet their family friends in person or connect with them through phone calls, SMS.
People returning to traditional means of communication
The phone dialer saw more usage than ever before, increasing 75 times as people turned to traditional more personal means of communication. The blackout also reminded the netizens to pay their due bills/invoices, as the traffic on the Jeep has increased by 200 times. The Trend Report is based on privacy-compliant data sourced (without any personally identifiable information) from 50 million devices in India.
“The global outage of Facebook’s assistive applications reveals insights into new communication patterns, changes in Internet usage behavior that were adopted by Indians, as did our AI-powered consumer data platform,” said Tabrez Alam, chief data strategy officer at Bobble AI, in a statement. The analysis was done by, which was built on the first party dataset.
The reliance on first party data is increasing in the industry, he said. We must use this pool of data in the most compliant secure manner in a cookie-less future to create innovative business solutions to drive analytics, personalization, targeting, predictive audience segmentation.
Signal and Twitter had profit
On 4 October, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger were not available for six hours to about 3.5 billion users in the world. The outage also shifted traffic to websites such as Signal, Twitter, among other social media applications, which saw a 140-fold, seven-fold increase in users, respectively.
Video streaming platforms like YouTube Jio also saw a 30x 20x increase in traffic respectively. In addition, the report showed that there was a 20-fold increase in the use of FM radio and a 700-fold increase in the use of other music apps. The gaming industry also saw heavy traffic. The report said that in the gaming category, Battle Royale Games (70 times), Temple Run (40 times), Parking Jam 3D (15 times) proved to be the biggest gainers.
