Facebook outage: Google Maps surged 125 times, phone usage up by 75 times

The usage of Google Maps went up by a whopping 125 times, when Facebook and its owned applications such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger faced a global outage earlier this month, according to a new report released on Wednesday.

The report by Artificial Intelligence innovation start-up Bobble AI showed that Indians chose to go back to the traditional ways of communication to connect their family and friends by going out to meet them in person or connecting them through phone calls and SMS.

Phone diallers saw a higher usage than ever, it went up by 75 times as people resorted to traditional and more personal means of communication. The blackout also reminded netizens to pay their due bills/invoices as the traffic on GPay went up by 200 times.

The trend report is based upon the privacy-compliant data sourced from 50 million devices in India (without any personal identifiable information).

"The global outage of Facebook and its subsidiary applications revealed insights on new Communication pattern and shift in internet usage behaviour that was adopted by Indians as analysed by our AI powered consumer data platform built on first party datasets," said Tabrez Alam, Chief Data and Strategy Officer, Bobble AI comments, in a statement.

"There is an increasing dependency on first party data in the industry. We must harness this pool of data in the cookie-less future in the most compliant and secure way to create innovative business solutions to drive analytics, personalisation, targeting, predictive audience segmentation and the customer experience," he added.

On October 4, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and its Messenger were unavailable to roughly 3.5 billion users in the world for six hours.

The outage also moved traffic to other social media applications and websites like Signal and Twitter that saw a surge in users by 140 times and seven times respectively.

Video streaming platforms such as YouTube and Jio Play also saw a surge in traffic -- up by 30 times and 20 times respectively.

Further, the report showed that there was a spike in FM radio usage by 20 times and other music apps usage went up by 700 times.

The gaming industry also witnessed huge traffic. The top gainers in the gaming category were Battle Royal Games (70 times), Temple Run (40 times) and Parking Jam 3D (15 times), the report said.