Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic

Posted by kdawson on from the off-to-neverland dept.

miller60 writes "Major news sites struggled to remain online yesterday evening as news of Michael Jackson's death triggered huge waves of Internet traffic. TMZ.com broke the news and was quickly overwhelmed, while Twitter turned off features to handle its load. They weren't alone. Keynote Systems reports that ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, and Yahoo! News all experienced performance problems between 6:15 and 9 pm Eastern time, when the average availability of news sites tracked by Keynote dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The cloud computing crowd immediately jumped on the traffic jams to argue their case. 'Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn't just wrong — it's idiotic,' wrote one cloud blogger."

3 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. Last.FM was hit hard by Renderer+of+Evil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    According to this graph.

  2. Its Princess Diana all over again by mseeger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hi,

    when Princess Diana died in 1997, we were supplying support services for one of the biggest news sites here in germany. It hit the site like a Tsunami. Unluckily someone reported in an IRC channel, that the news site would display pictures of the dying princess. So there was a real frenzy. It started early in the morning and we were called to fix a server malfunction. Unluckily the server malfunction turned out to be 99+% TCP SYN packets on the incoming side of the internet connect. That was at a time, when major news sites were connected by 2mbps lines :-). We were so fixed on locating a technical problem, it took us some minutes to connect the symptons to an event in the real world. Luckily the cab driver who picked me up had his radio on.

    CU, Martin

  3. Re:"cloud blogger"? by CXI · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Four-hundred years ago, on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes, called sabo, into the machines to stop them . . . hence the word: sabotage."

    Sorry, I couldn't help myself.