News of Michael Jackson’s death slows down major web sites

As news of Michael Jackson’s death broke yesterday afternoon, numerous major websites and services buckled under the onslaught of traffic:

Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public’s clamour for information.

The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service.
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TMZ, the popular celebrity gossip site that broke the story following a tip-off that a paramedic had visited the singers home also crashed.

There was a domino effect as users then fled to other sites. Hollywood gossip writer Perez Hilton’s site was among those to flame out.

Keynote Systems reported that its monitoring showed performance problems for the web sites of AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo.

Wikipedia also experienced problems, as reported by CNET:

By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: “Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties… Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))”

This raises a very valid question: Can the Internet handle big breaking news?

The statistics are amazing: Akamai said worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson’s death was breaking. That traffic forced even Google to its knees for a brief period of time Thursday afternoon.

The debate is an important one and it will likely be conducted at numerous places in the future.

Notably, the traffic increase was just 11 percent. As one source of information became unavailable, people moved on to other sources, which created a traffic ripple effect. It makes me wonder, what behavior could be observed, if several large news events occurred at roughly the same time.