expertSEM

Remember the Time the internet crashed? It was Bad. You probably wanted to just grab your keyboard and Beat It.

The tragic loss of an amazing performer, arguably the best of all time, brought the internet to a screeching halt the day of his death, June 25th 2009. The spike in searches from 2pm PDT to 3pm was so severe that Google News mistook it for an attack and for about a half hour, many searches ran into this error page:

Google News wasn’t the only one to run into trouble. TMZ, the celebrity news site that was the first to report that the King of Pop had passed, and several others including The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, CNET and CBS began to experience outages and slowdowns almost immediately. Akamai reported that Internet traffic was 11% higher than normal in the 3pm hour that day. 11%!

Other web users may have noticed the crunch on social sites and services such as AIM, Twitter and Wikipedia. I personally only experienced the ‘fail whale’ once, but found it amazing to watch the news break in real time. Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder) reported that there was an instant doubling of tweets, and nearly 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on that fateful Thursday afternoon. Traditional news outlets were not to be ignored however; CNN.com experienced 20 million page views in that same hour – second only to coverage of President Obama’s inauguration.

Yahoo News had arguably the best search engine coverage of his passing (while it was still just a TMZ fueled rumor) as discussed in this post by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal. Mediaweek reported that Yahoo experienced 16.4 million visitors that day – 4 million of those in the 3 pm PDT hour. The front page story “Michael Jackson Rushed to Hospital’ reportedly received 800,000 clicks in just 10 minutes!

“Michael Jackson Is Over Capacity” by Raul Orozco, based on the legendary Fail Whale illustration by Yiying Lu.

So is this an isolated event? Or, as more people begin to get their news through online outlets will we experience more of the same? CNET writers Tom Krazit and Declan McCullagh held this debate in a blog post titled Can the Internet handle big breaking news? Krazit wonders how much we can rely on “any system that doesn’t work precisely when people need it the most…[how can the web] be considered the future of communications?” He points out that when many people couldn’t get the breaking news they were seeking, they turned to old faithful – the television.

McCullagh counters that the effects were really just a microcosm on a few select sites, that most of the Internet was working fine, and for the rare incidents that a major news story is breaking, perhaps news organizations should purchase overflow capacity. However he concedes, “Because radio and TV are broadcast, they’ll always be more efficient at reaching hundreds of millions of people at once. So maybe CNN.com can’t compete with CNN Headline News right now. But if the worst that happens is major news Web sites get a little slow for some 30 minutes a year, I’m not going to worry about The Death Of Online News.”

What are your thoughts? Should Internet news providers be like the Boy Scouts – always prepared? The additional cost for overflow capacity may lead to fee based subscriptions, sort of ruining the point of news online in the first place.

Whatever your take, I think we can all agree that there is a very clear trend evolving of people seeking information on the net first – and as people evolve and change habits so too will the tools we use.