The Facebook outage was also a boon for Netflix

NETFLIX can thank Facebook for its latest boost. The streaming giant was one of the companies to benefit from the global social media blackout in early October. As web users found themselves no longer able to scroll on Instagram and Facebook, they took the opportunity to devour the trending series of the moment like "Squid Game." And Netflix seems to be increasingly gaining in strength in the face of social networks.

14%: that's the rate of growth that Netflix observed on its platform during the worldwide outage that affected the Facebook group on October 4. The streaming giant has obviously taken advantage of Mark Zuckerberg's misfortunes to increase traffic on its site: "[O]n October 4, when Facebook experienced a global outage for several hours, our engagement saw a 14% increase during this time period," Netflix revealed in its latest letter for shareholders, published October 19.

The situation demonstrates how Netflix can be a serious competitor of social networks. For the American giant, other streaming platforms like HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video are no longer its only rivals.

The emergence of new applications with a focus on audio and video blurs the lines between social networks and platforms. For example, in France TikTok partnered with Amazon Prime Video to broadcast the mini-series "Cités," specially designed for the Chinese social network, in February 2021, while in August the two firms teamed up on "Just So You Know," a spinoff of "Modern Love." Even more recently, Snapchat announced a new reality show on its network with Addison Rae, star of TikTok.

"We compete with a staggeringly large set of activities for consumers' time and attention like watching linear TV, reading a book, browsing TikTok, or playing Fortnite, to name just a few," Netflix outlined in its letter.

The battle for users' time has become ever more heated and was highlighted during the global outage that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger experienced in early October: "We are still quite small, with a lot of opportunity for growth; in our largest and most penetrated market, according to Nielsen, we are still less than 10% of US television screen time.

Our approach as always is to improve our service as quickly as we can so that we can earn a greater share of people's time," noted Netflix. In the wake of this, the streaming giant announced it has a new way of ranking its most-watched series based on the number of hours watched and no longer on the number of accounts that have watched.

The streaming giant isn't the only one to capitalize on Facebook's technical problems. Signal and Telegram have revealed an increase in their downloads. Recently, Telegram even revealed that it has surpassed 1 billion downloads on Android.