There was public relief Saturday in Hawaii that a missile ballistic missile attack alert was a mistake. Now we know there was a spike in private relief as well.
The adult website Pornhub reported its traffic in Hawaii drastically increased after residents were told the alert was a false alarm.
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The site tweeted a graph of Saturday’s traffic in Hawaii, and noted page views dropped drastically after the ballistic missile alert was sent at 8:07 a.m. HST. Traffic was “a massive -77 percent below that of a typical Saturday,” Pornhub said in a statement.
1960: In the future, we’ll be able to take a flying car to the moon
2018: We used the data from our porn site to prove everyone in Hawaii stress masturbated after someone accidentally texted them that they were all about to killed by a missile pic.twitter.com/70aop6z1Kj
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) January 18, 2018
However, Pornhub said traffic skyrocketed after residents were notified around 8:45 a.m. HST that the alert was a false alarm and there was no threat. Page views “surged 48 percent above typical levels at 9:01 a.m. (local time),” the website reported.
The emergency alert blunder caused more than 1 million people in Hawaii to fear they were about to be struck by a nuclear missile. Hawaii Emergency Management Agency spokesman Richard Rapoza said an employee mistakenly hit the live alert button, which sent out the false message.
Rapoza said the worker has since been reassigned.
