How Michael Jackson's death impacted the online world

The Sun

Michael Jackson's death has had an enormous impact on many of us--much bigger than we even anticipated. We've heard his music being pumped out of car radios, we've seen his videos and interviews on TV, and his face is on the front page of every news publication. But how did most of us hear of his death? The Internet. While big news companies like CNN stated he was hospitalized and in a coma, gossip site TMZ put the world in a frenzy by posting that the pop singer had in fact died. Paparazzi invaded the hospital and the Jackson family's personal space, even photographing the 911 paramedic's monitor (photo at left). Twitter-trending topics were overtaken by various incarnations of Jackson's name and people speculated wildly via Facebook updates. Is this where we now get our reliable news from? Tabloid sites and Twitter?

Gawker's site, Valleywag, kept tabs of the impressive impact the news about Jackson's death had on the internet yesterday:

Leading news websites saw traffic surge to 4.2 million visitors per minute from around 2.75 million visitors per minute, according to Akamai.
CNN's traffic grew five-fold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million page views.
Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama's election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
Facebook status updates tripled.
AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson's death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren't working on Google News.
Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson's page.

We're not sure what other events could potentially lead to this level of online meltdown. For those of you who were doubting the huge, global impact of the king of pop, stand corrected. [Vallywag][The Sun]