News Courtesy of Searchengineland.com:
An interesting thing happened on August 3. Facebook was down for nearly an hour in Europe and North America. During that time, many users who were shut out of their Facebook News Feeds went directly to news sites or searched for news.
Direct traffic spikes during a Facebook outage. According to data presented by Chartbeat at the recent Online News Association conference, direct traffic to news publisher sites increased 11 percent (in large part from app-driven traffic), and search traffic (to news sites) increased 8 percent during the outage that occurred a little after 4:00 p.m., as shown in the chart above.
Ryan’s Take 
I must’ve missed the August 3rd outage. I don’t recall it affecting me. I do remember the September 3rd outage that lasted roughly 90 minutes. Perhaps Facebook will go for the trifecta with an October 3rd blackout?
Anyhow, the data that was shown from Chartbeat really puts the reliance on social media for news and information in perspective. For me, Facebook “news” never really hit a chord. I remember the recently shuttered trending section which would sometimes prompt me to click on an interesting headline. However, I’ve always had my few staples of news websites that I visit directly.
Since the news feed from Facebook currently is made up of posts from friends and family (with a sprinkling of sponsored ads), I’m at a loss as to why there was such a spike in direct and search traffic for news. Is it truly a result of people needing to get their fix of news when Facebook went do? Or perhaps, just another way to fill the void of boredom? I believe that since Facebook is so accessible from work, home, and on the go that people use it habitually. When you take something away that is addicting, even for an hour, something else needs to take its place. In this case, news!
