I think virtually everybody has become aware of Michael Jackson’s departure as of today. Before you jump to conclusions, this is not meant to be a post on the piece of news itself, it is, instead, a thought on the aftermath of a big (and unfortunately tragic for many) event: an earthquake that hit the web. And it did it pretty violently.
It has been reported that Google, Wikipedia, Twitter and many other sources of information were all hit by this calamity: the world of the web 2.0 struggled for a good few hours due to the incredible amount of requests and posts about the celebrity’s death. The effects were similar to what happens in case of real cataclysms: mass panic.
Google confirmed that for the first couple of hours from the unofficial announcement of pop star’s death, the too frequent requests for information related to Jackson have been treated like automated attacks, therefore for a few hours the search engine refused to return results on that subject prior to returning to normality.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, faced a different issue: several thousands of users stormed the encyclopedia’s website to give their input to what is likely to be one of the biggest events of the decade. The result was that, due to the lack of real information, the administrators of Wiki had to do “some” extra work: users added details to MJ’s death while others deleted those entries claiming it was all false news, starting some sort of battle to “the last edit”.
Twitter crazed: as the news first appeared, twitter’s users started requesting for links, posted bits of information and posted links to YouTube videos. Some websites thought to play a prank (of really bad taste) claiming that other famous actors were reported dead: as a result twitter was spammed with false information about these alleged deaths (June 25th will also be remembered as the day of Farah Fawcett’s death, and this one is unfortunately for real). After few hours, when official sources denied those happenings, everything went back to normal.
Many other websites all over the world, especially news related ones, collapsed under the weight of too many requests. As a user, I’m the first to get angry when I receive a “connection interrupted” message by my browser while trying to access some website, but I also know that insisting is of no help to anybody: neither to myself nor to the poor lads that have to deal with these issues on the hosting server (fellas, you have my sympathy)…
Every earthquake has at least one… what’s with aftershocks? I can’t tell the future, but I can guess what’s already happening. Sales on iTunes are likely to skyrocket (and I’m confident this is happening as I’m writing), YouTube will be flooded for several weeks with tribute videos, black hat communities will start releasing leaked and previously unreleased material from the pop star to the public while online newspapers will start revealing “secret” details about his life and legacy.
In regards to countermeasures, I’m pretty confident that the “authorities” of the web have already started preparing emergency plans in case similar events happened to occur again: I have a funny feeling that next time there will be no “quick, everybody hide under the table!!” emergency signal and the Web will respond even more promptly.
This is the good resource that can be found on the internet. I hope to see more of good content like this. Thanks once again! Regards, Lorna