After the unexpected death of legendary pop star Michael Jackson, there has been much talk of the internet buckling under the strain of web users searching for the latest information. Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook bore the brunt of people’s reactions and news sharing as more details became public knowledge.Celebrity news websites which were first with the news such as TMZ, the American celebrity gossip site which originally broke the story, and infamous celebrity blogs like Perez Hilton, also suffered periods of down time or slowness.
Even Google News felt the pressure. A Google spokesperson confirmed: “Some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson.” This difficulty occurred between 10.40pm and 11.15pm UK time.
During this period Google News did not go down, but users searching for Michael Jackson related information were asked to verify they were indeed a human and not a computer attempting to launch a spam attack.
However, despite the issue of individual sites going down and experiencing slowness, experts say that at no time was the internet in danger of ‘breaking’.
The last time there was such strain put on the web was in the aftermath of 9/11. However, despite certain individual sites being unable to cope with the pressure in 2001, most notably the BBC which went blank for a period, people could still surf the rest of the web.
A spokesperson from Virgin Media, one of the major internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK, said: “Virgin’s core network of internet usage increased by 10.8% on Thursday night (June 25), the evening when the news broke, in comparison to the previous evening. However, we experienced no problems in providing the internet to homes.
“In situations like these where there is a surge in demand for specific information, the problem is rarely with the internet as a whole, or with ISPs or networks, which serve the information. The problem is usually with individual sites being unable to cope with demand. Whenever there is a rapid rise in the demand for a single or a few particular websites, those sites might not have enough bandwidth to cope and could go down.”
James Blessing, managing director of Garou, an ISP consultancy, explained: “When we design ISP networks, there is always spare capacity worked into the plan. It will only ever be 60-70 per cent full in order to be prepared for situations like this.
“Michael Jackson’s death came nowhere near close to crashing the internet. A few individual sites with limited bandwidth will have experienced problems, but the internet is set up with spare capacity to cope with surges of usage.”
Experts say there was the fear last year that the Olympics could have caused internet meltdown. However, no such problem occurred because the event was spaced out over a period of time, and there was no single event which galvanised the interest of the whole world at one point, so the web could cope with demand.
“Although you never say never, it's very hard to envisage a time when the internet would truly break,” said Simon Barlow, internet manager at Interoute, which owns and operates Europe's largest next-generation internet network. “Individual websites may suffer downtime from increased traffic, but the core internet infrastructure should remain stable.”
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