Google, Twitter and other sites could not withstand the traffic of Michael Jackson fans

The King of Popmusic acquired stellar status long before the Internet, but the Internet was also influenced by Michael Jackson during the moments after his death.

The news of the death of Michael Jackson was the reason for the massive rise of Internet traffic on Thursday evening, temporarily blocking Google and adding a huge amount of traffic to popular sites such as Twitter and BBC News.

The Press Association reports that so many people went to Google to check out early reports of Jackson's death, that Google News servers interpreted the search for “Michael Jackson” as an automated attack for about 30 minutes.

The BBC News website reported that British traffic was 48% higher than usual at 4 am on Friday, while Twitter traffic also jumped.
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Keynote Systems, a provider of measurement and testing solutions for Internet and mobile services on demand, said on Thursday that many major news websites have become almost inaccessible to users. This peak has exceeded most recent important news and marketing campaigns on the Internet .

In the late afternoon of the Pacific Coast of the United States, all major news sites, including ABC, AOL, LA Times and CBS, began to show a noticeable slowdown in performance.

Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, said: “The average download time for news sites doubled from less than 4 seconds to almost 9 seconds. During the same period, the average availability of sites from the index fell from almost 100% to 86%. The index returned to normal by 21:15 EDT (US Atlantic coast time). ”

Ethan Zuckerman, a man from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, said that Jackson quickly became the most popular topic on the micro-blogging site as soon as he was hastily taken to hospital on Thursday.

“My Twitter search script sees that about 15% of all Twitter postings mention Michael Jackson,” Mr. Zuckerman wrote on his Twitter page , “I have never seen Iran or swine flu reach more than 5%. "

However, according to reports , at some point Twitter also failed to cope with the peak traffic.

At 9 am on Friday, 5 out of 10 of the most discussed topics on Twitter were associated with the pop king. Thousands of people switched from AIM to Twitter after AOL's instant messaging service stopped coping with traffic spikes, according to the US magazine PC World.

Users from both the US and the UK and Australia reported problems. During the 40-minute interruption of AIM, more than 4,000 people turned to Twitter to find out what happened to the AOL service, and unexpectedly discovered that Michael Jackson was hospitalized. Then came the message that the 50-year-old singer died.

Fainted in his residence in Los Angeles, Jackson was hastily taken to hospital by orderlies, before at 14:26 (21:26 UTC) his death was announced.

The celebrity gossip website TMZ was the first to announce a sensation after the leaked information that the orderlies visited the singer's house.