A flurry of Web surfing for news about Michael Jackson's untimely death flattened Google News June 25. The search engine and Web services provider refused to serve searchers Web pages for nearly a half hour. Facebook, Twitter and other Websites also experienced a burst in traffic, the second spike in as many weeks thanks to the Iranian election furor.
Crashes on the Web are common, but you don't often hear of crashes on
Google's Web search engine, which reportedly has the infrastructure muscle of
some 1 million servers worldwide powering searches for 65 percent of the
world's Internet users.
Yet that's exactly what happened June 25 afternoon when news of Michael
Jackson's death seized the Web and millions of users flooded Google, Facebook,
Twitter and other popular Web services. Like a tidal wave rolling across a vast
ocean, millions of users
surfed Google for news and updates about the pop icon's passing.
The spike in Web surfing crushed Google so hard that Google News mistook the
fervent interest for an automated attack and stopped serving some Web pages.
For a good 25 minutes Thursday, some people searching Google News were greeted
by a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking
for. The "we're sorry" was a kind of plea for help from Google's
servers, which were blitzed by the action.
Google Search Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman
explained:
"Search volume began to increase around 2:00
pm, skyrocketed by 3:00 pm,
and stabilized by about 8:00 pm. As
you can see in
Google Hot Trends, many of the fastest rising search queries
from yesterday and today have been about Michael Jackson's passing (others
pertained to the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett)."
Pittman also noted that Web users also used their cell phones to check on
breaking news. Google was the beneficiary; five of the top 20 mobile searches
were for Jackson.
A Google spokesperson later
told Search Engine Land's Matt McGee the traffic crush was an
"all-hands-on-deck" moment for the company, whose support engineers
had to work to get Google News back online.
Michael Jackson's premature death of a heart attack at the age of 50 also
caused record traffic spikes at social networks Facebook and
Twitter and the Los Angeles Times' Website. Jackson's
death (along with those of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon) caused the second
major Internet traffic spike in as many weeks.
Millions of people June 15 took to tweeting on Twitter about the Iranian
presidential election, which many citizens felt the Iranian government rigged
in favor of winner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The State Department took the unusual step of
beseeching Twitter not to pull the plug June 15 to do an
important network upgrade. Twitter
complied and conducted the upgrade the following day.
While such crashes may reflect poorly on the companies, they can also be
blessings in disguise, forcing Web service providers to plug their
technological holes, bolstering their hardware and software infrastructure
against future traffic gluts. In Google's case, perhaps the company's engineers
could better train its software to distinguish between an automated attack and
a massive outpouring of human interest.
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