CYBERSPACE—While there isn’t much that can tear porn fans away from their favorite pastime, Saturday’s remarkable events in Hawaii proved that there may be one thing that can quell the appetite for online adult action: the threat of nuclear destruction. For almost 40 minutes on Sunday morning, an erroneous “ballistic missile alert” went out to Hawaiians, causing thousands to desperately seek shelter and contemplate the end of everything.
The “emergency alert,” was sent to phones across the state and read, in all caps, “BALLISTIC MISILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Recently escalating rhetoric between Donald Trump and the newly nuclear-armed North Korea gave the threat near total believability.
But statistics from the porn mega-site Pornhub also showed that once that threat was proven to be a false alarm after 38 minutes, Hawaiians immediately began watching online porn—in huge numbers.
According to a usage graph released by Pornhub this week (pictured), compared to average Hawaiian porn traffic on a Saturday morning, viewing plunged sharply as soon as the missile alert hit, bottoming out at a level 77 percent below typical levels at 8:23 a.m., 16 minutes into the nuclear crisis.
By 8:45 a.m., officials realized what was going on and issued a new message explaining that the first terrifying alert had been a mistake. Why it took well over half-an-hour for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to realize that Hawaii was not, in fact, under a nuclear attack has not been adequately explained.
But what is certain is that the relief of knowing that nuclear armageddon had been cancelled, at least for the time being, led many Hawaiians to seek distraction in porn. By 9:01 a.m., 16 minutes after the nuclear alert was called off, Pornhub traffic reached a peak of 48 percent above the expected average for that time period.
