Public mourning of Michael Jackson broke the Internet
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Transcript of a text conversation last evening around 6 p.m.:
Friend texts me: “The Internet is broken.”
To which I respond (densely): “What?”
His response: “A joke. Too many huge stories at once.”
It may have been a joke, but it was a prescient one:
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.
It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.
We tweeted our pain. We conveyed our grief via Facebook status updates. We desperately searched for answers on Google and celeb gossip news sites. We crashed Perez Hilton.
Some people grieved the old fashion way. I heard a long drawn-out scream from someone in my neighborhood: “Michaaaaaeeeeeeel!”
But all that doesn’t stop the hurt. We woke up today and MJ is still gone, though the King of Pop left his mark on our music, our lives, and Google Trends.
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I would like to take this opportunity to thank the mourners who blasted “Beat It” outside my pilates class for a solid hour last night. There’s a time and a place for high-volume displays of MJ grief. Pilates is not one of them.