The Facebook Blog

"Dustin, come take a look at this – the graph is crashing."

Sure enough, our active users count was dropping off like a rock shortly before 6pm PST. But I wasn't worried. The same thing happens every week at this time: hundreds of thousands of people tune out of Facebook to tune in to Grey's Anatomy. The dip two weeks ago was actually much sharper than normal, due to a cliffhanger the week before, which enticed more people to start watching on time.

By the end of the episode, nearly 200,000 people had built up a Facebook craving: the graph comes promptly back up at the end of the hour.

A more granular view of activity: the number of users who have taken an action within a 60 second period. It’s easy to see 10-15k people taking Facebook breaks during each of the commercials. Not Pictured: Another 20k viewers took more traditional bathroom breaks, and 12k made a snack.

At this point, almost ten million different users sign into the site every day, or more than half the user base. During our biggest peaks - Sunday & Monday night around 10EST - more than one million people will be simultaneously logged into the site. So, when something occupies a big portion of the population's attention, we notice.



Dustin, a Facebook co-founder, watches Grey's Anatomy each week solely to keep in touch with Facebook users and definitely not because he's dying to see if McSteamy can handle Addison's bet.