In terms of well-known celebrities, few are bigger than Michael Jackson. Love him or hate him, pretty much everyone on the planet knows him. And that caused big problems for a lot of huge websites today with the news of his passing. It was probably t

In terms of well-known celebrities, few are bigger than Michael
Jackson. Love him or hate him, pretty much everyone on the planet
knows him. And that caused big problems for a lot of huge websites
today with the news of his passing.

It was probably to be expected that Twitter would struggle as
reportedly hundreds of thousands of tweets came in about Jackson in a
very short amount of time. While I only got a couple actual Fail
Whales, the site was really sucking wind for much of the hour that
people were trying to get information about him. But Twitter was
hardly the only site that was struggling.

Various reports had the AOL-owned TMZ, which broke the story, being
down at multiple points throughout the ordeal. As a result, Perez
Hilton's hugely popular blog may have failed as people rushed there to
try and confirm the news. Then it was the LATimes which had a report
saying Jackson was only in a coma rather than dead, so people rushed
there, and that site went down. (The LATimes eventually confirmed his
passing.)