Twitter ground to a halt last Friday but you can’t blame it on the Sunshine, Moonlight, Good Times or the Boogie! No, it fell over and started body popping ‘Fail whales’ all over the place due to one thing – the passing of the King of Pop. The whole world awoke on Friday to the shocking news that Michael Jackson had passed away and for a short time at least, took the internet with him!
We may be some time away from finding out what actually killed Michael Jackson but in the meantime, we do know that when the news broke on Friday, the internet was the way the story broke and as a result, broke the internet.
People at the Glastonbury festival awoke to rain and the buzzing of their phones to the news that Michael Jackson had died in LA. Most people thought it was a hoax at first – no that was Jeff Goldblum – but reality soon dawned but getting the facts proved a little difficult.
TMZ who initially broke the story kept seeing usage drop outs due to the volume of traffic hitting the site. However, it seems that Twitter and Google were the biggest casualties, with the site seeing repeated drop outs all day. Then there was Google, which at its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as “volcanic” forcing Google to simply just stopp working for short periods.
It wasn’t just Twitter and Google that suffered, CNN apparently had a 5x rise in traffic in little over an hour when 20 million page views were clocked up shortly after the story broke. Wikipedia also seemed to be hit, with nearly 500 edits made to MJ’s entry in less than 24 hours. At other times the site was reportedly shut for business due to the amount of traffic that hit it.
While the world seems to be busy letting everyone they know, or don’t, how they feel about the sad passing of MJ, it seems the Big Brother crowd will be left in ignorance – no change there then!
I’m not even going to go into the amount of public grieving that has been going on, that’s something between you and your conscience. What does all this frenzied sharing of information tell us? Well, clearly Social Networking is alive, well and thriving and when the big stories hit – and face it Jacko dying is a big big story – Social networking is now the way most people will get the news first.