The Cold Turnkey

After news about Michael Jackson’s sudden death, the broadband internet slowed down - getting jam packed by users who wanted to confirm the news.

Google informed the BBC that they had actually felt scared about there being an attack by some virus. Google had reacted immediately by issuing a warning stating that the queries of persons who searched for the star looked identical to automated queries by some cyber virus or spyware.

The search trends pages maintained by Google showed that during 2:40pm to 3:15pm Pacific Time, there was an all-time high in the Search Volume which reached ‘volcanic’ levels.

Not only Google, but Twitter, a micro-blogging service too was affected by the surge in the use of the net. According to a report by the BBC, there were more than 66,500 posts relating to the death of Michael Jackson on Twitter before it broke down. Trendrr, a web analysts company, reported that the Twitter blogs about the artist were more than 100,000 per hour.

The popular internet encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, also suffered a breakdown because the users kept on trying to update the Wiki entry on Michael Jackson.

News related websites were also impacted by the death of Michael Jackson. The performance level of sites like AOL, MSNBC and Yahoo deteriorated, according to Keynote Systems. Shawn White said on behalf of the company that the downloading speed increased to nine seconds from four seconds. Moreover, there was a 14 per cent decrease in average availability of sites, which was earlier almost 100 per cent.