SmarTrend(R) News Watch: Michael Jackson News Crashes Web Sites

The initial unconfirmed news of pop star Michael Jackson's death created a tsunami of Internet users hungry for information, so many that they almost broke the Internet. Okay, that may be a stretch, but several news sites, including Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) experienced outages from waves of users. A Google spokesman told CNET, "Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson." TechCrunch reported that Time Warner's (NYSE:TWX) TMZ, which broke the news, experienced several outages. Celebrity news specialist Perez Hilton also went down from traffic. CNN reported a five-fold increase in Web traffic, receiving 20 million page views in one hour. Even Twitter experienced an overload that choked tweets with its signature "fail whales." The L.A. Times quoted an AOL statement that said, "AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon" AOL consumer advisor Regina Lewis told CNN, "AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon . . . Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."

Write to Chip Brian at cbrian@tradethetrend.com

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