News sites, search engines overwhelmed
Following news of pop icon Michael Jackson's death yesterday, search engines,
news sites and even Wikipedia found themselves overwhelmed by huge
numbers of visitors looking to find out more about the star's fate.
Google told BBC that it feared it was under attack after millions of
people started googling Jackson's name within minutes. In the end the
system could no longer cope, and simply started displaying an error
page instead of search results.
Twitter was also in trouble, and before it crashed Jackson's name
appeared in 65,000 Twitter updates. Wikipedia was also affected, as
fans rushed to update the the site with fresh info, creating a
nightmare for editors.
Many other sites, including AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo also faced problems following reports of Jackson's death.
More
here.