We examined the immediate impact of a social media outage on nomophobia and associated symptoms using a longitudinal cohort design. Data were collected at two timepoints, baseline (T1) and during the social media outage of 4 October 2021 (T2). T1 was collected in August-September 2021 as part of the baseline of an ongoing study. The nomophobia questionnaire (NMP-Q), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale (GAD-7), and Athens insomnia scale (AIS) were administered to 2706 healthy participants from the general Bahraini population (56% females, mean age 33.57 ± 11.65 years). Approximately one month later, during the social media outage, 306 of the study participants were opportunistically assessed using the NMP-Q. At baseline, we found that nomophobia levels strongly correlated positively with both insomnia (p = 0.001) and anxiety symptoms (p = 0.001). This is the first report to examine the impact of a social media outage on nomophobia. Our findings indicate that symptoms of nomophobia increased significantly during a social media outage. Baseline insomnia scores predicted a surge in the global scores of nomophobia symptoms during a social media outage.
Keywords: anxiety; insomnia; nomophobia; sleep problems; social media outage.