Michael Jackson’s Death Causes Internet Meltdown
Author: Likkle Miss // Category: Looseneck News
If anyone in the world deserved to shut down the net, it’s the freakin’ king of pop!
According to Sky.com Michael Jackson’s death has caused a massive worldwide surge in online traffic after millions of people logged on to find out more about the star. The spike began after American gossip website TMZ.com broke the story that things were “looking bad” for the controversial ‘King of Pop.” The enormous interest in the story caused the site to temporarily go down, but that did not stop the news spreading via blogs and social networking sites. Facebook reported that the number of status updates during the hour after Jackson’s death was triple the average.
Nine out of the ten most popular topics discussed on Twitter were about Jackson, with many celebs choosing the site to express their condolences. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that the passing of the global icon caused “the biggest jump in tweets per second since the US presidential election”.
So many people wanted to verify the early reports of Jackson’s death that the computers powering Google’s news section interpreted the surge of ‘Michael Jackson’ requests as an automated attack.
The O2 Arena’s website was unavailable soon after confirmation of his death as thousands of fans searched for information about refunds for the 50 dates Jackson was set to commence at the venue in July.
The increased web traffic shows how the singer captured the imagination of the public, despite years of controversy.
Tags: death, internet, meltdown, michael jackson
