Internet buckles under weight of fan frenzy
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Saturday June 27 2009
THE death of Michael Jackson became the biggest story yet to hit the internet, as leading websites struggled to cope with a deluge of traffic from people wanting to find out the latest news.
Celebrity news site, TMZ.com, secured the scoop of a lifetime when it was first to report that Jackson had died -- but the site then crashed several times, unable to cope with millions of visitors flooding to it.
Google believed it was under attack when the news first broke. For 35 minutes, millions of people who Googled Jackson's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.
Facebook reported that Jackson's page was attracting about 20 fans a second, and fast becoming one of the top pages in all of Facebook.
Perez Hilton's gossip blog also broke down under the weight of people rushing to the site, and the micro-blogging service Twitter shut down temporarily after receiving hundreds of thousands of tweets.
Internet analysts said that, at its peak, roughly 15pc of all posts on Twitter mentioned Michael Jackson. (© The Times, London)
- Murad Ahmed
