MySpace's recent downtime last week, caused by rolling blackouts in the Los Angeles area, sent its legions of users scattering across the Web in search of their Internet fixes, causing traffic spikes
at Google and MySpace competitor Facebook.com, according to data released Wednesday by Hitwise. Google, among top sites, experienced the greatest spike--shooting from about 4.1 percent of total
Internet visits to roughly 4.45 percent at the height of the outage, on July 23. Facebook.com went from .45 percent to roughly .50 percent during the same period. Hitwise also noted that MySpace users
looking for love apparently went elsewhere. Dating sites experienced an increase of more than 10 percent in market share, and adult sites also experienced a "mild bump-up."
--Shankar Gupta
