The Internet Mourns Michael Jackson

Yesterday Michael Jackson died from a heart attack.

AOL’s TMZ first reported the story and spent all night covering the story as it developed.  As a result, TMZ’s traffic spiked and they had the capacity to keep the website online while their competition’s servers couldn’t handle it.

TMZ wasn’t the only one that had traffic spikes.  On Twitter over 5,000 messages were sent out per minute shortly after the Michael Jackson news story broke.  The number of tweets doubled according to Biz Stone.  AOL Instant Messenger and LiveJournal’s servers also took a big hit, causing a slowdown.  The Los Angeles Times website hit about 2.3 million pageviews in one hour after the news story broke.  Facebook status updates tripled from the average.

[via BusinessInsider/LAT]

Related posts:

1. Michael Jackson Launches Application Competition On Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace
2. Michael Massimino Prepares To Twitter In Space
3. PimpThisBum.com: Bringing Hope To The Homeless Using The Internet
4. MySQL Co-Founder Michael Widenius Steps Down From Sun
5. Michael Arrington Blames AllThingsD.com and Valleywag For Recent Attacks