The death of Michael Jackson almost brought the internet to a stand-still yesterday, as millions of users around the world raced to both news websites and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.Twitter reportedly had it's number of tweets per minute more than double, and after crashing due to heavy volume had to disable some of it's search and trend topic features. Twitter has not seen this amount of activity since the election of President Barack Obama.
Facebook has also seen a large number of Jackson-related activity. The official Michael Jackson page on Facebook now has over 1 million fans, and these numbers are growing by the thousand each hour. An "RIP Michael Jackson" page created yesterday already has over 400,000 members.
AOL's instant messenger service was also hit, a company press release stating that "AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon." The statement said that "today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."
Wikipedia saw over 500 entries made to Michael Jackson's page in less than 24 hours, and was also reportedly overloaded with visitors.
TMZ.com, the website that broke the story, experienced several outages during the day. Blogger Perez Hilton's website was also struggling to deal with the number of visitors searching for news on Michael Jackson.
The only non-Michael Jackson-related search term to enter the top 10 yesterday was a rumour that Jeff Goldblum had fallen to his death from the Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand. His publicist soon released a statement revealing this was completely untrue.
AOL consumer adviser Regina Lewis also stated that the day was a historic milestone for mobile internet traffic, as many people were reading the news headlines from work.
"People wanted to keep tabs on this story, but if you're an accountant you're supposed to be working on your spreadsheet. So they were using their personal cell phones to do so," she explained.
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