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Unless you’ve been living in a subterranean cave somewhere in the far reaches of the Himalayas, you’ll of course know that the King of Pop legend that is Michael Jackson passed away a few days ago. Now how did everyone find out about this. There was TV and the radio for those who happened to have it on but for most people it would have been on the internet and what better place to search out information than Google.

 

At 9:45 pm GMT time, Google saw within about 10 minutes of the news first breaking on the TMZ website, a remarkable 16.4 million unique visitors worldwide logged onto their computers and searched for Michael Jackson. This unilateral action completely threw Google off so badly that it’s news site was inaccessible for a good 25 minutes. In fact the error messages that came up when people tried to Google this piece of news was that "We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now." In fact the security company that protects company issued malware warnings and even had some users use CAPTCHA verification boxes just to make sure you weren’t a bot and suspected that this was an attempted terrorist attack to bring down Google.

 

 

We can only assume for now that this was an automated response due to the system’s algorithm detecting a huge spike of traffic from a mass number of IP addresses from the around the world rather than a human error which made Google double over.

 

In fact it wasn’t just Google that this surge in traffic manage to take down. Twitter which has in the past been used to break upcoming news ultra-fast collapsed under the weight of “tweets”. However it must be added that even my own experience with Twitter has shown it’s servers can’t cope with anything whether it be the Iranian conflict, the launch of iPhone 3.0 or even just the release of Star Trek the film is enough to bring it to it’s knees.

 

AT&T the American mobile phone operator also reported that it set a new record for the most text messages to be sent on their network. A whopping 4,000,000 text messages per minute were being sent around which was significantly more than during the 9/11 attacks. However bare in mind that the number of users on the network has increased fourfold since 2001. Facebook too showed it’s dominance of the social networks but trouncing all it’s competitors to the river of traffic and proving that although it may not be the most efficient platform for news reporting, it most certainly was the most popular.

 

 

That said, the editors of CNET’s Buzz Out Loud Podcast Rafe Needleman and Tom Merritt did mention a good point on the podcast a day or so after this event. If there really is to be a global crisis or some sort of worldwide phenomena that needs to be reported to the world, don’t we need a system in place that doesn’t collapse under the weight of traffic pressure? If heaven forbid, an asteroid was coming towards the Earth on the scale of dinosaur extinction level, should we not have a more stable and emergency system for this to be reported on? Would there not perhaps be more than the 16.4 million visitors we saw on MJ’s death?