Los Angeles, CA – Michael Jackson’s death caused chaos on the internet, with Google thinking it was under attack as millions of people searched for more information.
“Very soon after his death, search volumes were so high that our systems suspected a coordinated spam attack,” a spokesman told TG Daily. Users searching for more details on the star’s death were presented with a captcha screen.
The spokesman said that during the last 24 hours, an astonishing half of all searches in the US were related to Jackson. Farrah Fawcett-Major picked the wrong day to expire: “Farrah Fawcett-Major only got five percent of searches,” said the spokesman. He described the spike in searches as ‘volcanic’.
Twitter experienced one of its not-so-unexpected outages, with the site shutting down briefly after traffic soared. The total number of tweets doubled the moment the news hit the net, and at one point, a quarter of all messages referred to Jackson. It was the biggest spike in the number of tweets since the presidential election.
According to Twitter monitoring service Trendrr, the number of posts referring to Jackson climbed as high as 220,000 per hour.
Amazon has sold out of CDs and DVDs, listing up to two weeks delivery. Jackson is currently holding all of the top ten positions in the US CD chart and all five music videos.
Meanwhile, it seems that two deaths weren’t enough for celeb hounds. A hoax was soon doing the rounds on the internet claiming that actor Jeff Goldblum had also died by falling off a cliff. Unfortunately, Australia’s Channel 9 news took it seriously and reported it.
