Any doubts about Michael Jackson’s megastardom should have ended after news of the singer’s death tripped up Google and crashed AOL Instant Messenger, Wikipedia, TMZ and, of course, Twitter. A survey of the epic traffic:

#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.

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