Facebook has record hit on Christmas Day

CHRISTMAS Day was the busiest ever for Facebook. Figures show that one in 22 website viewings in Britain on 25 December were of the site.

Facebook and other social networking site have enjoyed huge growth in the capital in the last 12 months, with more than 3.2million Londoners signing up.

It has become so popular that more than two thirds of companies, including British Gas, the Met and Lloyds TSB have banned employees from accessing the site at work, claiming it wastes too much time.

"Traffic to Facebook reached a new high on Christmas Day," said Robin Goad of web monitoring company Hitwise.

"Facebook's traffic was up 69 per cent on Christmas Day 2007, and it was the second most visited website after Google UK."

Other social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo also had huge rises in traffic, with social networking sites accounting for one in 10 UK internet visits during Christmas week.

YouTube also saw a big rise in traffic, being the third most visited site after Google and Facebook.