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Websites swamped after Michael Jackson's death; Google feared it was under attack
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AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi
As shock and confusion spread over the death of Michael Jackson on Thursday many websites saw an unprecedented increase in traffic from viewers searching for facts surrounding the legendary pop singer.
Millions who searched for news regarding Jackson on Google were met with an error page saying "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application." The BBC reported that Google confirmed that when the news first broke, the search engine feared they were under attack.
The micro-blogging service Twitter crashed because of the volume of people using the service.
Before its crashing, the number of posts on Twitter Thursday afternoon containing "Michael Jackson" totaled more than 100,000 per hour, according to data from Trendrr, a website that monitors activity on social media sites.
That means that the news of Jackson's death was garnering the same amount of posts as the Iran protests. Twitter posts about Iran topped 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour.
Yahoo News set a single day record for individual visitors with 16.4 million. More people visited the site on Thursday than did on election day this past November.
AOL's AIM instant messenger was blindsided by a sudden skyrocketing in users following Jackson's death and, overwhelmed, shut down for approximately 40 minutes.
The all-Michael Jackson station on AOL Radio experienced a 28,471 percent increase in usage.
All of the increased traffic caused many sites to run considerably slower if they didn't crash altogether.
At 2:30 PM Pacific "the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds," said Shawn White, Keynote Systems director of external operations.
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