Michael Jackson crashed the internet, sold the albums, is not Billie Jean's lover
Via the Google Reader Recommended Items feed, here's a list of the effect that Michael Jackson traffic had on the internet:-Leading news websites saw traffic surge to 4.2 million visitors per minute from around 2.75 million visitors per minute, according to Akamai.
-CNN's traffic grew fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
-Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama's election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
-Facebook status updates tripled.
-AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
-TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson's death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
-The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
-For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren't working on Google News.
-Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson's page.
[See information source and data links at Gawker]
Bonus information from things I've seen:
-Chart of Google search volume by time
-Over on iTunes, Michael Jackson's albums currently occupy slots 1-9 of the top selling albums for all of iTunes (as seen at right)