Michael Jackson's death causes surge in internet traffic
A number of high-profile websites suffered severe slowdown last night as users across the globe attempted to verify news of pop star
Michael Jackson's death.
Visitors to Google, the BBC, Twitter and a number of American gossip sites suffered unprecedented levels of slowdown which was caused by a substantial increase in traffic.
A number of websites crashed under the increased strain, most notably
TMZ – the site which broke the story of the singer’s death. It is reported that AOL, CNN and Yahoo also suffered from technical issues which prevented user access.
Elsewhere, a sharp increase in the number of Google searches for the singer’s name caused many queries to return an error page. A number of searchers were redirected to a page which read, "Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer 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," a spokesperson for Google told the BBC
BBC and Twitter reported increased traffic
Statistics released today reveal a surge in traffic to a number of different websites. The BBC News website stated that user levels were 48 per cent higher than average. Meanwhile, the number of Twitter posts containing the keywords “Michael Jackson” featured in over 66,500 updates during a four hour period.
A spokesperson for Keynote Systems, an internet research firm, said that a number of websites suffered from the increase in traffic.
"[At one point] the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds," said Shawn White, the company's director of external operations.
