How many people does it take to break the internet?

[Faith]

How many people can you name who could stop the world in the tracks like this?

How many people does it take to break the internet? Just one. The web suffered a number of slowdowns on Friday as people rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson’s death. The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe, the BBC News portal reported. Search giant Google confirmed to that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a virus or spyware application”. “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,” said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker. It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead. Google’s trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called “hotness” gauge the topic was rated “volcanic”.The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site at 0400 BST was 48% higher than average. Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public’s clamour for information.

The news of Michael Jackson’s death rocked Twitter as fans of the star sought the latest information and posted their reactions. Ethan Zuckerman, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, said Jackson was a more popular topic on Twitter than the Iran poll or swine flu ever were. “My twitter search script sees roughly 15% of all Tweets mentioning Jackson,” he said. “Never saw Iran or H1N1 reach over 5%.” On Friday all other mentions were repla-ced on Twitter’s trending topic colu-mn by those of Jackson.

NYT NEWS SERVICE As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with requests. CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke. Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches. But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its wellknown outages. According to initial data from Trendrr, a webservice that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts containing “Michael Jackson” totaled more than 100,000 per hour.

[Thunderouszebra896]

well princess diana comes to mind. When someone becomes an icon the world sort of falls apart for a while when they die.

[Kev]

I noticed Yahoo Answers was running really slow at that time too.
I'm always breaking things, I get the blame for breaking the internet all the time...

[Rich]

One person can't bring down the internet. Servers can get overwhelmed with requests and even shutdown. There are just too many access points to the internet for all traffic to come to a stop because of one person; maybe a few thousand people that knew what they were doing.

[Bear]

Just as with the Royal whore Diana,it goes to show how many pathetic,emotional cripples the World has!
He was JUST a singer!

[Friendlybird367]

A bit like when the phone's went down over the millenium...the traffic was too high to cope with. Michael Jackson fans would have been frantic over the news of his death on a world wide scale..I think the comeback tour had the interest high and his sudden death sent folk into overdrive. I think like many others it was initially thought to be a hoax. I loved his music but did not really rate him...far to wacky and weird