Media News - Friday, June 26, 2009
Web slows after Jackson’s death
The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death. Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who Googled the star's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. It warned users "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," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker. It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead. Google's trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called "hotness" gauge the topic was rated "volcanic". Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public's clamour for information. The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service. Before the company's servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates. According to initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts Thursday afternoon containing "Michael Jackson" totaled more than 100,000 per hour. TMZ, the popular celebrity gossip site that broke the story following a tip-off that a paramedic had visited the singers home also crashed. (BBC News)
Subscribe
Join our Media News mailinglist with over 12.000 subscribers.
Search archive
The Media News archive contains over 15.000 items so it is advised to narrow your search.
Time Machine
| May 2012 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
Syndicate
Popular articles
- WikiLeaks announces partnership with Brazilian investigative journalism center
- Acclaimed photo was faked
- Euronews launches Arabic feed
- Iran: Leading women’s magazine forced to close
- US: Nonprofit website plans watchdog journalism for Orange County
- New website reaches out to EU Neighbourhood Journalists
- Internet censorship plagues journalists at Olympics
- MySpace opens doors to developers MySpace webpage
- Sweden: Tax on press advertising to be abolished
- Startup lets public test conversational Web search