When Michael Jackson unexpectedly died last week, he set one last record in his many acclaims: he broke the Internet.
Following are quotes from three sources that explain it all. Amazing!
The Internet was built to withstand nuclear attack. That was why it was built in the ’60s in the first place, as a communications system with redundancy built in so that the military could communicate even if one of the nodes went down.
We saw some of that happen today, as news of Michael Jackson’s death spread like wildfire through the Internet. TMZ.com got the scoop about Jackson being sent to the hospital. But the site went down from the surge of traffic. The LA Times reported he was in a coma, but then that site went down too. The LA Times managed to report that Jackson was dead, and then everyone else started buzzing about it. Twitter went down. Keynote Systems, which measures web site performance, said that the following sites all slowed significantly: ABC, AOL, LA Times, CNN Money and CBS. Starting at 230 pm PST, the average load time for a news site slowed from 4 seconds to 9 seconds. (source: VentureBeat)
Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who searched for the star’s name on Google News were greeted with an error page. It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.
“It’s true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page,” said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.
Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public’s clamour for information. The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service…Before the company’s servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that “Michael Jackson” appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates. According to initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts Thursday afternoon containing “Michael Jackson” totaled more than 100,000 per hour. That put news of Jackson’s death at least on par with the Iran protests, as Twitter posts about Iran topped 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour. (source: BBC)
Wikipedia saw a flurry of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson’s entry in less than 24 hours. CNET reported that by 3:15 p.m. PT, Wikipedia seemed to be “temporarily overloaded.”
The Los Angeles Times…reported that AOL’s instant messenger service had been hit, quoting an AOL statement that said, “AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon.” The statement said, “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”
That was backed up by AOL consumer adviser Regina Lewis, who said that, although the numbers weren’t in yet, the day should prove a historic milestone for mobile Internet traffic.
“It could go down as the biggest mobile event in history,” Lewis said. She felt that was in part because people were checking news headlines from work. “People wanted to keep tabs on this story, but if you’re an accountant you’re supposed to be working on your spreadsheet. So they were using their personal cell phones to do so,” she explained. (source: CNN)
