Social Networks Shine and Struggle Under Huge Traffic Load Following Dark Day of Celeb Deaths

When Farrah Fawcett lost her valiant fight against cancer yesterday morning, Twitter and Facebook came alive with chatter about the 70’s icon and traffic surged. Later that afternoon when pop icon Michael Jackson’s sudden death shocked the world, that traffic spiked so high AIM was knocked offline and Twitter had to disable some features to keep the service running-in fact they are estimating that roughly 30% of all Tweets being posted are about Michael Jackson. Facebook slowed to a crawl and generated various errors. Even Wikipedia and Google crashed for a short time. The traffic generated by shocked and grieving fans is overwhelming.

Social media shined with the Michael Jackson story. The blog TMZ was the first to break the story, which spread like wildfire across the net, especially on Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately Perez Hilton did his fellow bloggers a huge disservice when he made a very nasty post accusing Jackson’s sudden collapse of being a lie to help him get out of his planned UK concert tour. As soon as the news broke of his death Hilton took the post down but the damage was done. Outraged Twitter users began an “Unfollow Perez Hilton” campaign and screenshots of the post made the rounds of both Facebook and the blogsphere. If that black eye wasn’t bad enough, social media got another one when a few bloggers, in a selfish attempt to grab some of the Jackson and Fawcett traffic, started spreading false news stories claiming that actor Jeff Goldblum had been killed in an onset accident while filming a movie in New Zealand and actor Harrison Ford had been lost at sea in a boating accident. These fake stories only added to the enormous surge in traffic hitting social networking sites.

Expect most of those sites to continue having high traffic and even periodic outages. Jackson’s death is being compared to that of Elvis Presley. Can you imagine what it would have been like if the net and social networks had been around back in 1977?

Share your stories with us. Did you find out about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson online? Have you experienced problems using your favorite sites? Leave a comment and let us know!