August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009
By now everyone knows about the death of Michael Jackson yesterday. The only thing that has been reported at this time is that he had cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. Other specifics have not been released yet.
Some have said that Jackson may have been the most famous person on an international level. He may have had a questionable personal life but no one can deny his impact on the music world.
On June 25, 2009 around 2:40 pm Pacific Time several websites and services began experiencing slow downs and problems as a result of millions of people worldwide trying to find Jackson related information simultaneously.
Between 2:40 pm and 3:15 pm Pacific time people performing Michael Jackson related searches were greeted with the error “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.” This means that the Google system perceived so many searches for the same thing at the same time as an automated virus trying to potentially attack the system. Once Google fixed the problem it continued to run slow for several hours do to extreme levels of traffic.
Twitter experienced downtime as a very large number of users began sending out tweets related to Jackson virtually at the same time. Twitter continued to run slow for the rest of the day. Social Media and News related sites also reported slow downs as everyone seemed to be trying to find any news or updates regarding Jackson’s condition.
It may be stating the obvious but widespread downtime like this has never happened before.
Tags: google, michael jackson, Social Media, traffic, twitter, web, website