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Michael Jackson's Death Triggers Internet Surge Traffic Chaos06/27/2009 09:37 am

Posted by Norman Pascual

Internet users around the world flooded news sites and social media networks Thursday in an effort to confirm early reports of pop icon Michael Jackson's death, triggering massive availability issues.

Celebrity news site TMZ.com, which first broke the news of Jackson's death, was knocked offline after the site was bombarded with traffic, according to reports by Techcrunch.com.

In an effort to resolve the issue, the site's webmasters disabled search features in account profiles to better handle the spike in the server load.

As the story circulated across the web, significant performance issues began to occur with major news sites, including ABC, AOL, BBS News, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle, and Yahoo! News.

From 5:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. EST, the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds, while the average availability of these sites decreased from nearly 100 percent to 86 percent, according to Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations.

Meanwhile, popular social media network Twitter, search engine Google, and instant messaging services like AIM and AOL experienced overwhelming amounts of traffic, causing many of them to crash.

According to reports by the Press Association, the barrage of Google searches for "Michael Jackson" caused Google's News servers to interpret the searches as an automated attack for approximately 30 minutes.

News on Jackson's death commanded Twitter pages, with seven of the top ten "trending topics" being MJ-related.

PC World reported that AIM also experienced a blackout that lasted for 40 minutes, although it is yet to be confirmed if this is related to the outpour of Internet users seeking news on Michael Jackson's death.

The 50-year-old Jackson was rushed by paramedics from his Los Angeles home to the UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 2:26 p.m. EST.

Although TMZ.com was the first to report Jackson's death at 5:20 p.m. EST, with many other news sites  following suit, CNN.com, LATimes.com and many other news sites were reluctant to report beyond Jackson's hospitalization until the death was completely confirmed.

This discrepency in facts lead to mass confusion, causing many to scour the Internet for more information. We are grateful that all XNet sites and the Atlanta DataCenter did not suffer from the traffic spikes.