It may be more than nearly 20 years since Michael Jackson was the dominant personality in the music industry, but news of his death caused an avalanche of online traffic as millions of people turned to the web to find out the latest news about the singer’s health.
Shortly after 4pm in New York — less than an hour after Michael Jackson was taken to hospital in Los Angeles — TMZ, the popular celebrity gossip website, broke the story after a tip-off that a paramedic had visited the singer’s home.
“It’s looking bad,” the site claimed, reporting that he had suffered a heart attack. “We’re told his mother is on the way to visit him.”
Other sites soon had the news too — US entertainment channel E! spoke to Joe Jackson, the 50-year-old’s father, whose grim prognosis — “He is not OK” — foreshadowed the news that would be confirmed just a few hours later.
Within seconds of the first reports hitting the web, information started spreading online — flushing a mixture of confirmed reports and hearsay through a string of other news websites, blogs and social networks. Tributes to the controversial entertainer began flooding in even before his death was confirmed at 3.15pm local time.
The volume of traffic temporarily took down TMZ, causing many interested surfers to try visiting other gossip blogs for updates — however, the sheer number of visitors then caused other sites to crash, including Perez Hilton’s popular page.
Many web users reported that their connections had become slow or unresponsive as hordes of people fled online.
On Wikipedia, the conflicting reports of Jackson’s health caused a short editing war between users over whether or not he had died; meanwhile tens of thousands of messages started hitting messaging website Twitter, causing the service — which had been urged by the US government to stay online at the height of the Iranian protests — to come grinding to a halt.
“Anything to do with Michael Jackson is still a big story,” one TMZ editor told Fox News. – guardian.co.uk