Michael Jackson dies, taking the internet with him.

Due to the surge in traffic to several major internet sites including American news sites due to searches related to Michael Jackson: google, wikipedia, twitter, facebook and 30 other top online media sites all either collaspsed or suspended services. Also, 9 out of 10 trending topics on twitter are now related to the king of pop.

There were more than 66,500 tweets within an hour of the first reports that the star had been rushed to hospital, and soon the microblogging site also collapsed for a while. The LA Times website, which was the first to officially confirm the report of Jackson's death, also went down. The news even affected UK news sites; the BBC News website reported UK traffic was 48% higher than usual at 4am on Friday.

So many people wanted to verify early reports of his death that the computers running Google's news section interpreted the "Michael Jackson" requests as an automated attack for about half an hour and the average time it took to access the home pages of top media sites jumped from 4.2 seconds to 8.9 seconds. Lastly, a review by Keynote Systems, a company that tracks site performance, the availability of more than 30 online news services fell from 100 per cent to 86 per cent.

An amazing day in history for the internet; the moment he died and news broke, there was a volcanic eruption in the Internet search, who knows what the statistics for mobile internet will be like?

Tags: collaspsed, down, facebook, google, internet, jackson, michael, news, services, twitter

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Permalink Reply by Nathan on June 26, 2009 at 12:31pm: to be honest this is a little bit of a huge fuss because some one has died and is rather stupid there wouldn't be this much fuss if they found madeline so i don't see why they would do it over a pedophile that used to be a pop star; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David King on June 26, 2009 at 1:04pm: because he's quite popular aswell as the fact that it affects glastonbury and people who have bought tickets (not cheap may I add) to go see him bring things back, to be told he's died.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Pedro Remedios on June 26, 2009 at 12:54pm: The internet should fall everytime EVERY person dies in this world! Not just when celebrities die! Sure I was shocked but only for 10 minutes!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David King on June 26, 2009 at 12:56pm: If that were to happen then we wouldn't have an internet because lots of people die all the time, someone is probably dying as we speak, but the only reason we don't think about that is because we don't know who that person is, its only because of the media that we know michael jackson has died.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Cal M. Desmond-Pearson on June 26, 2009 at 1:05pm: Who really cares anyway? It's just one less child molester in the world!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David King on June 26, 2009 at 1:14pm: Obviously a lot of people if you consider what happened to the internet.. :S; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Nathan on June 26, 2009 at 2:30pm: no we dont care for the internet we just care for the fact that we hated jackson

and to be honest he got a good break from doing that final gig and the family are still going to keep the money hell this was planned so that his big ass funeral would cost them nothing! it was all planned; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David King on June 26, 2009 at 3:33pm: so why would so many people search about him to find out how he died and more? and then also post thousands of tributes on youtube and listen to his songs etc?

if thats your opinion, then fine(:; ▶ Reply to This