The death of child loving, popular beat combo star Michael Jackson caused such a spike in web traffic that Google was convinced it was a hacker attack.

The outfit published an error page if people searched for the yarn on Google News. The firm’s director of product management, RJ Pittman, said that search volume began to increase around 2pm PDT on Thursday and ‘skyrocketed’ by 3pm, finally stabilising at around 8pm. It was one of the largest spikes that Google had ever seen and it was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack, he wrote in his blog.

Interest in the aging pop star's death was so high that the Los Angeles Times web site also crashed soon after it broke the news of Jackson’s death. More than 66,000 Twitter Tweets were made within a 60-minute period causing that network problems too.Meanwhile the rest of the world has had to put up with the most hypocritical performance of television and radio stations, who were baying for blood during Jackson's paedophile cases, playing sanctimonious tribute weekends.

It seems that the pop star who could do no good in his later years has been rehabilitated in death thus giving a way forward for Gary Glitter.