There are few moments that cause the internet to have major problems. However the death of Michael Jackson, one of the best known celebrities in the world, caused social sites and many news sites to struggle with the amount of visitors they had.
It was probably to be expected that Twitter would struggle as reportedly hundreds of thousands of tweets came in about Jackson in a very short amount of time. While I only got a couple actual Fail Whales, the site was really sucking wind for much of the hour that people were trying to get information about him. But Twitter was hardly the only site that was struggling.
Various reports had the AOL-owned TMZ, which broke the story , being down at multiple points throughout the ordeal. As a result, Perez Hilton’s hugely popular blog may have failed as people rushed there to try and confirm the news. Then it was the LATimes which had a report saying Jackson was only in a coma rather than dead, so people rushed there, and that site went down. (The LATimes eventually confirmed his passing.)
Meanwhile, CNN wasn’t down, but failed for another reason. CNN first said that Jackson was revived before going to the hospital.
And just in case you didn’t believe this story is dominating the web right now, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter are MJ-related. The lone exception is Ed McMahon, who also passed away two days ago. Meanwhile, Twitter search seems to be running about 20 minutes behind. Twitter became so popular that they even had to remove features like the search on the main site.
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