The shocking news of the King of Pop’s sudden death yesterday sparked so much Web traffic that Google’s news-link Web site had to put a temporary block on “Michael Jackson” search requests.
Google’s computers incorrectly interpreted the flood of requests as a “denial of service” attack meant to crash the news site.
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The flood of chatter and tributes did bring down sites across the World Wide Web.
The superstar’s home page barely functioned after the announcement.
Eventually, the site’s links were removed, leaving only a depiction of Jackson in his trademark white T-shirt and black jacket and hat shown against a blood-red background with the words: “King of Pop.”
Also inaccessible was the home page for London’s O2 concert venue, where Jackson was set to kick off an epic, 50-date tour next month.
Three of the top five searches on Google last night related to Jackson.
Twitter also was abuzz when rumors of the pop star’s death — the subject of hundreds of thousands of blog postings — first began to circulate late yesterday afternoon.
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“Michael Jackson was wheeled into the emergency room on a stretcher according to X17Online,” one frantic tweeter posted on the MJJ news site.
The swirl of Web traffic was so intense that a rumor of another celebrity’s death, Jeff Goldblum, spread like wildfire and had to be quashed by the actor’s publicist.