How Michael Jackson's Death Affected the Internet

The Internet traffic boom that surrounded Michael Jackson's death last week had Internet Technology specials around the country are working to prevent massive denial of service attacks caused by simply too much traffic on mainstream web sites. Major sites like Google News, Wikipedia, LAtimes, CNN and social networks like Twitter and AIM took periodic outages, some as long as 1/2 an hour at a time due to the flood of traffic as people attempted to learn as much as possible and as quickly as possible about the artist.

Music sales and piracy of Michael Jackson's music few as downloads, sales, and number of torrents and seeds/leeches increased dramatically on all the major bit torrents and media sites. It is unfortunate that the artist will probably reach another music sale record in death that he hadn't hit in more than twenty years in life.

Bloggers scrambled to be among the first to bring the latest news updates in the hope to grab the search traffic going wild, twitter helped promote the news and information faster than updating a web site or blog could even be possible. This type of event and outage now has companies working to prevent such incidents from happening in the future.

If important news information breaks world wide, news companies have a responsibility to make sure their sites are accessible so everyone can have information quickly and accurately, by sites such as CNN, Google News and Newspaper sites going down, this greatly affects a companies ability to provide such breaking news and content, and further proves that live CNN broadcasts and news feeds, will still be the prominent distribution method for news.

Twitter rapidly is becoming a more important communication tool as its ability to break cutting edge news and stories is faster and more pervasive than even the blogosphere, as this service continues to gain popularity Twitter needs to invest in an infrastructure capacity that can handle the load, which means they need corporate backing and financing at a higher level. One would think Google should invest in twitter and somehow start leveraging the service as a distributor for Google News and other information for those who sign up.