The sad passing of Michael Jackson became a breaking news story that sent a shockwave spike through the infrastructure of the internet. Google saw a huge spike in traffic that security threshold detectors interpreted as a hacker attack, resulting in a 25 minute captcha confirmation or service refusal from Google News. Yahoo had the MJ report headlined in their news aggregator, then Google had it further down, and Microsoft's Bing had it way way down. A Bing blog post seemed to imply that it was ranked down because it did not have images with it, which breaking news typically wouldn't.

The website TMZ.com broke the story 20 minutes after his passing, then went down briefly under the load. The LA Times was the first news site, and it fell over soon after. Online news services saw a 20% increase in traffic, but the availability of popular web news sites dropped from 100% to 86% and didn't return for another 4 hours.