News of Michael Jackson's death caused a huge surge in online traffic, putting many websites and services offline and struggling to keep up.
It was the American site TMZ that broke the news, reporting that it was "looking bad" for the star. Then numerous other news sites, blogs, social media and websites reported something similar, they all further surged the traffic.
And when major news website like CNN and BBC confirmed the death of the "King of Pop," things started to not look good for the internet.
The massive level of interest from most people on the internet trying to find out about the news, made some websites inaccessible.
It started with TMZ which had its website inaccessible for several times in the first hour; the LA Times website was also brought down by the massive traffic, after receiving more than 2.3 million page views in one hour.
Twitter experienced delay of about 5-6 minutes with several "fail whale" crashes after more than 100,000 tweets about Michael Jackson's death were posted in under an hour. At that time, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter are MJ-related. The platform had to also remove features like Search on its main site to stay online.
Wikipedia also experienced a massive surge on Michael Jackson's page, forcing it to freeze its edit feature because contributors were engaging in back-and-forth edits about Jackson's conditions.
America Online’s AIM instant messenger product which was undergoing some minor scheduled maintenance around the time of the Jackson news, was severely impacted by the story and went down for more than 40 minutes; Facebook was relatively stable, despite experiencing triple the traffic in the first hour. Michael Jackson fan page rose to nearly 20 new fans per second in the period following Jackson's death.
BBC News website reported UK traffic was 48 percent higher than usual, requiring it to do some adjustment to stay online.
And the most notable, was Google. The search giant interpreted the "Michael Jackson" requests as an automated attack. During this period Google did not go down, but was inaccessible to some users for about 30 minutes. Those that were searching for Michael Jackson related information were asked to verify they were indeed a human and not a computer attempting to launch a spam attack.
"It's true that between approximately 2:40 p.m. Pacific and 3:15 p.m. 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.
Fans also logged on the Myspace page of his former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, to pay tribute. Michael Jackson’s songs started racing up the iTunes charts in the face of massive demand, and YouTube experienced more users watching music videos from the late pop star. Online sales of Jackson's music experienced a similar surge, with the icon's album's jumping into the top slots on Amazon.
The effect of Michael Jackson's death crippled many parts of the internet, after earlier the same day, 1970s icon Farah Fawcett also died. After Jackson’s death, false reports of the passing of Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford also put more pressure on global web servers.
CNN survived because it waited for the coroner's confirmation before it stating Michael Jackson was dead. But later reported a massive rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views the moment it verified the story.
The last time there was such surge on the web was in the aftermath of 9/11. However, despite some news websites weren't unable to cope with the traffic in 2001 event, notably the BBC which also went blank for a period of time, people could still surf the rest of the web.
