Michael Jackson's memorial service: Will online traffic crash the web?

Michael Jackson (Urban Daily)

The Staples Center web site took down every non-essential image and menu just to try to stay up and running during the sign-up period for the Michael Jackson memorial ticket lottery. Their announcement page attracted 500 million visitors during the first hour and a half. 

The questions that brings up are obvious: How many people will be online trying to watch live video streams from the event itself? And will that massive onslaught of traffic crash the web?

Social media gurus at Mashable say the memorial will be "a huge test for the entire infrastructure of the web."

This event will almost certainly shatter records for the biggest single live stream ever, and could be one of the biggest worldwide media events in history. Will the web be able to handle it?

Google News, the Los Angeles Times, TMZ, Yahoo News and MSNBC went down during the surge in traffic on the day the King of Pop died, according to Softpedia. Why did those major sites slow or crash? Because they had to wait for servers to fetch third-party content, such as images for ads, according to a Digital Beat report.

If those major news sites had stripped all unnecessary images (including ads) during that traffic surge, they most likely could have handled the traffic surge with few, if any, problems. But can you imagine a news site turning away ad revenue during the biggest media event in history? We think not.

And besides, the crushing traffic on July 25 took place across a 24-hour span. This Tuesday, hundreds of millions of users could converge on the web at the exact same time to watch live video streams. Losing some ads might not do the trick anyway.

Mashable asks:

Can the web’s biggest players handle the massive traffic that will ensue? Will there be enough bandwidth? Could this event be the single media event in history? The answers to these questions will not only be a testament to Jackson’s impact on the world, but may very well set records that will last in history.

Softpedia says:

...it’s doubtful that any one service will be able to handle the load and most likely all of the major players in online streaming as well as a great number of media sites will broadcast the memorial.

On the plus side, there is time to plan. All of the major sites will undoubtedly add servers and strip content as necessary to stay up and running at normal speed. Also, since the memorial is being broadcast simultaneously on TV, a lot of web traffic could be diverted to that medium — and traffic doesn't crash TV.

So we're going to save some bandwidth for the rest of the world by watching the event on our big-screen high-def TV. We might tweet on our laptop if Twitter springs for a few extra servers that day.

How do you plan to watch?

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