Background. Although the importance of social media platforms in people’s daily lives
and their role in advertisement, and the persistent increase in online gambling participation
over the years are unquestioned, no study has examined how the unavailability of social
media affects online gambling. A 6-hour-long worldwide outage of Facebook on 4th October
2021 created a unique possibility to investigate this relationship.
Objectives. The aim of the present study was to examine whether online gambling behaviour
during the Facebook outage was different from gambling patterns on other Monday evenings.
Methods. We analysed behavioural tracking data from an online gambling service provider,
Fortuna Entertainment Group (FEG). The datasets included information on the gambling
patterns of 232,037 players from five different countries (Croatia, Czechia, Poland,
Romania, and Slovakia) on five consecutive Mondays, including the day of the Facebook
outage. A linear regression was estimated for several outcome variables (number of
players, amount of stake, number of bets) separately for each country and gaming and
sports betting type of gambling, while gender, age, time, and date were included as
control
variables.
Results. Most of the ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions showed a non-significant
impact of the outage, and only a few significant, but small differences were identified.
In these cases, the outage was associated with a lower outcome.
Conclusion. In the case of the examined countries, the Facebook outage only had a
marginal impact on gambling behaviour. Further research and analysis are needed to
explore the connection between social media use and abstinence and gambling.
