Michael Jackson's Death Crashes Twitter, Perez, TMZ Servers??

There are very few people on this planet who can actually make major site servers crash with mere news about them -- one of them, of course, is the late great, legendary King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

According to TechCrunch, news about Michael Jackson's untimely death spread like wild fire in Twitter yesterday and eventually crashed the site. TMZ, which broke story, and PerezHilton, a celebrity news blog, also suffered the same fate:

It was probably to be expected that Twitter would struggle as reportedly hundreds of thousands of tweets came in about Jackson in a very short amount of time. While I only got a couple actual Fail Whales, the site was really sucking wind for much of the hour that people were trying to get information about him. But Twitter was hardly the only site that was struggling.

Various reports had the AOL-owned TMZ, which broke the story, being down at multiple points throughout the ordeal. As a result, Perez Hilton’s hugely popular blog may have failed as people rushed there to try and confirm the news. Then it was the LATimes which had a report saying Jackson was only in a coma rather than dead, so people rushed there, and that site went down.

TMZ, however, eventually denied the 'crash' report and issued a statement:

[O]ur internal records show that the site didn’t experience any interruption due to traffic. It’s possible that some people may have had trouble accessing the site due to local network issues, but TMZ was not down.

And amidst all the issues, an interesting question arises:
Is the internet ready for BIG breaking news?

What do you think?

[via TechCrunch]

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