The story about the death of Michael Jackson was so big an event, that several news sites and services simply could not keep up with the increased traffic from visitors. Gossip “girl” Perez Hilton took quite a blow in his website uptime, as well as TMZ, which recovered fairly fast though.
Even Twitter wasn’t able to cope with it all, but they’re already having some issues every now and then, so no big news really. According to Trendrr an amazing 100,000 mentions of Michael Jackson occured on Twitter – an hour!! That’s about the same high level as the beginning of the Iran election.
Good ol’ mighty Google didn’t have the best of days either. They confirmed to BBC that they actually thought they were victim of some sort of an attack, since so many searches occured for the same subject at the same time. That’s why alot of people ended up with the message “We’re sorry but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer”.
R.I.P., M.J.