Response times by top US news sites were slowed as millions
of Michael Jackson fans scrambled for confirmation of rumours of
his death.
Twitter was the source of many of the initial reports that the
king of pop had died, and the microblogging service also struggled
under the load.
ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle and Yahoo
News were all hit by lower response times, according to performance
index firm Keynote
Systems.
By late yesterday afternoon in the US, the average response time
from news sites was almost nine seconds - more than double the
normal response time of less the four seconds, Keynote Systems
said.
This indicates that consumer demand for news is now online, with
people checking social media sites and online news sites before TV,
said Keynote Systems
Twitter responded to the overwhelming increase in traffic due to
thousands of messages being posted by Jackson fans by disabling
some functionality on the network to keep the service working.
"We have had to temporarily disable search results from the
logged-in homepage of twitter.com. We are working on the underlying
problem and will bring back these features as soon as we can," a
Twitter
blog posting said.