• By Ryan Tate
    Jun 26, 2009 12:32 PM 0
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    Michael Jackson Traffic Melts Entire Internet

    Any doubts about Michael Jackson's megastardom should have ended after news of the singer's death tripped up Google and crashed AOL Instant Messenger, Wikipedia, TMZ and, of course, Twitter. A survey of the epic traffic:

    • 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 fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
    • 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.


    Send an email to Ryan Tate, the author of this post, at ryan@gawker.com.