The death of Michael Jackson almost caused the internet to fall over last night. The last time I recall anything like this happening was on 9/11 when all the big news sites almost dropped off the net under the sheer weight of traffic, and phone networks jammed with people, including me, trying to contact relatives in New York.

Last night the phone was replaced by Twitter, which struggled manfully as usual and failed briefly, as usual. Google came under such fire from people searching the singers name that it thought it was being attacked and put up an error page

“your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.

According to initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts Thursday afternoon containing “Michael Jackson” totaled more than 100,000 per hour.

That put news of Jackson’s death at least on par with the Iran protests, as Twitter posts about Iran topped 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour.

Contributors to the stars wikipedia page struggled manfully to keep up with events, celeb gossip sites TMZ, which broke the story, and Perez Hilton’s blog also crashed under a barrage of hits.
AOL,CBS,CNN,MSNBC and Yahoo also came under fire.

According to Keynote Systems, beginning at 2.30PM Pacific “the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds.

Scouring Twitter and Friendfeed this morning shows quite clearly that the web is the primary source of breaking news for a very large number of people.

Where were you when the King of Pop died?