The Powertool Shed

The recent death of Michael Jackson, the global superstar, had an unprecedented effect on the internet. Many websites crumbled under the pressure of users who tried to confirm whether Jackson had actually died.

The popular microblogging site Twitter crashed as a huge number of users tried to post messages about Jackson’s death. According to the BBC, the number of tweets about Jackson was estimated at about 65,000. However Trendrr, a web analyst company, put the number much higher, claiming that before Twitter ground to a halt the number of tweets had reached a whopping 100,000 an hour.

Wikipedia struggled as its active editors tried to update the entry on Michael Jackson simultaneously. Even the search giant Google was not spared as its systems interpreted the huge activity as malicious. The site therefore displayed a message to users looking for information on Jackson that their query looked suspicious and resembled activity from a computer virus. Google Trends, a service which tracks what people are searching for on the internet put the volume of traffic generated by Michael Jackson’s death at ‘volcanic’ proportions.

It was reported that news sites like AOL (click for info on AOL broadband), Yahoo, MSNBC and CNN also suffered from traffic overload. The average time required for loading these sites went up from about 4 seconds to 9 seconds. Moreover, the availability of these sites to the users dipped from the usual 100% to about 86%.