Last Friday, Facebook went down for somewhere between a half an hour and an hour for a lot of users. According to CharBeat, this led to a decline of 3% in overall web traffic to news sites, and an 8.5% decline in mobile traffic.

As a result of the outage, people visited news sites themselves, rather than relying on their News Feeds to highlight the stories they should’ve been consuming. ChartBeat’s Josh Schwartz digs into the impact the outage had on “dark social” traffic and what people did while the social network was down here (via MarketingLand).

“Our brief world without Facebook looked a bit different, albeit in predictable ways,” concludes Schwartz. “Significantly less news was consumed on phones, slightly more homepages were visited on desktops, and 30 minutes later, when Facebook came back online, traffic returned to normal.”

While this is only a small sample of what a world without Facebook could look like for publishers, this recent report from Shareaholic drives home just how much sites rely on Facebook for traffic these days. No other social site even comes close to driving the referrals Facebook does.

VentureBeat determined that the outage cost the company about $20,000 per minute, based on its ad revenue from Q2.

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