Michael Jackson takes Internet with him

[Chippiewill]

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8120324.stm

The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death.

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who Googled the star's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.

Google trends, searches for 'Michael Jack Death:

[Alkaz]

we see it going up but it just goes up, there is no y axis to the graph so its pretty pointless

[N!ck]

If Google were struggling it must have been busy :S.

[Recursion]

Google weren't struggling, Twitter was though, their automated system just detected it as a spyware/virus threat from the amount of traffic with the same keywords.

[Berch]

Lol. Must of been busy if Google are saying it must be millions of people searching his name than mainly his fans and so on I assume.

[Chippiewill]

Google weren't struggling, Twitter was though, their automated system just detected it as a spyware/virus threat from the amount of traffic with the same keywords.

500 million strong botnet? would love one of those, take any website down

[Wolves]

500 million strong botnet? would love one of those, take any website down

wouldnt we all? but saying that their probably two billion pc's in the world, so if you wanted a 500m botnet then you'd need 1/4 of the worlds pc's to be your zombies in your botnet, and i doubt thats possible... ever.

[Jaysun]

I love how you titled the thread. It seems like everyone forgot about Farah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.