Online News Websites and Blogs reported chaos on the Internet in the first few hours following the death of Michael Jackson.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: ‘We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke” where 5000 tweats per minute were Michael Jackson related.

The number of Facebook posts tripled during the hour of Michael’s death.

Such was the surge in online traffic that Google returned an ‘error message’ for searches of the singer’s name as it assumed it was under attack. Wikipedia also crashed.

The Internet at its peak on Thursday night had 4.2 million global visitors per minute – where normal traffic is around 2 million. 84% (over 2 million) of the increased traffic was from from USA .

The race was on to secure domain names relating to Michael Jackson and his songs – Go Daddy registered over 3,700 by 1pm on Thursday – just hours after Michael’s death.

And finally downloading of Michaels songs on sites like iTunes and memorabalia sites like Ebay were flooded. We have witnessed the power of and maybe the limitations of the Cyberspace to communicate big News.

Sources: – DailyMail.co.uk; 411mania.com