Breaking News breaks records across the net

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.

The impact on news sites may not have been due only to their capacity to handle the load increase, but also on the advertisement networks they use where slow loading ads could prevent a page from displaying. This is dependent on browser and site design, and could be cause for dumping 3rd party ads during demand spikes..... An interesting debate on breaking news on the internet that started on a private technology mailing list went public with some thought provoking ideas. The other peak was the wave of commentary and blogging that followed the media reports. This interest in MJ is helping music retailers who are seeing a sales surge which coincided with campaigns for his live concert schedule. Another not-so-pleasant coincidence is the closeness to the annual July 4th American holday spam surge. Micheal Jackson related spam is now flooding inboxes, and a Sydney music radio site was even hijacked as part of one scheme.

Michael may be gone, but his last performances live on. Rehearsals filmed as extra material for a concert DVD may become the main concert, some of which you can watch now.

Don Maclean hit the charts mourning the death of Buddy Holly more than a decade later with American Pie. Could the same thing happen again for Michael? Stay tuned for any breaking news.....