While sitting in a business meeting yesterday afternoon, my Blackberry suddenly starting buzzing away, indicating a surge of new emails flooding my system. Interested, I snuck a quick peak, only to see the big news – Michael Jackson had died. Stunned, I blurt out in the meeting, “Oh, my God! Michael Jackson died!” I, along with the rest of the world, was shocked by the stunning news, coming in just hours after news of Farrah Fawcett’s demise hit the internet news stream. 

Apparently, the internet is not as robust as we all believe it to be, as Google, CNN, LA Times, Wikipedia, and most other news and search related sites experienced a volcanic eruption of online visitors searching for the latest news updates about what happened to Michael Jackson. Even Twitter crashed and had to be temporarily disabled due to the overload of traffic coming into the site. LA Times, the first news organization to confirm his death, reported being down for 40 minutes after “never seeing anything like this in terms of scope or depth.” AOL consumer Regina Lewis said that the day would likely become a historic milestone for mobile internet traffic. Mashable.com even reported that topics related to his death were responsible for 30 percent of tweets.

With the ability to have news at our fingertips and in a world of real-time reporting not only from news organizations but from “Tweeters” who often don’t get the real and accurate story, our society has proven what we all have known for the past several years: we are dependent upon the internet for our information.

News of Michael’s untimely and unexpected passing started a whole new wave of people online sharing information, reacting to it through various social and email postings, starting tributes in his honor, as well as starting a whole new line of communication regarding urban legends and the “who’s next to bite the bullet” tailspin.  

All being said, while I am not surprised to hear that most of the world joined me in their interest and disbelief by heading to the internet in search of the “real story” behind what happened (which, let’s be honest, folks – we really won’t know this for some time), but I am surprised that the power of the technical revolution on the internet cannot sustain the significant spike in user volume due to such an event as the death of a super star. I am simply hopeful that internet user capacity and speed significantly grows before the next “big event” in our universe unfolds. 

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/26/michael.jackson.internet/index.html