How Jacko’s death affected the web

Where were you when you heard Michael Jackson had died?

Well, apparently millions of us were sat in front of a computer or on mobile internet devices frantically searching the web for more information on why/how/when it happened. So many people infact, that the web could not quite handle it…

Google had so many users searching ‘Michael Jackson’, that its operating system closed down to protect it from what it thought was a harmful virus. So instead of users reading lists of results about Jacko, they were treated to a page titled ‘your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application’. Google had this to say in its defence; “It’s true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page”.

The social networking service Twitter also crashed due to the shear amount of users. TweetVolume (a service that instantly measures how many people are tweeting about a particular item) noted that “Michael Jackson” appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates (one of those was me!) before it crashed.

AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo were also affected however the BBC news website apparently had no such problems.

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Tags: bbc, consumer technology, twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.