News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic

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."

Comments

"cloud blogger"?

[siddesu]

shouldn't that mighty concept get its own word, like "clogger" or something?

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[Dunbal]

I believe "cloggers" are tap dancers and the name is derived from the wooden shoes from Netherlands.

      You obviously never had a job cleaning toilets in a public place when you were a teenager.

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[CXI]

"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.

Last.FM was hit hard

[Renderer of Evil]

According to this graph.

Re:Last.FM was hit hard

[harry666t]

I wonder how these events affected the output of a few random number generators.

Wikipedia article

[Tragedy4u]

The Michael Jackson Wikipedia article was inaccessible for several hours yesterday too.

Re:Michael who?

[GGardner]

Michael Jackson, great guy, wrote books about beer, died a couple of years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(writer)

Poll results

[suso]

Right now the results of the /. poll are showing the majority of votes as him being forgettable. Obviously the current young generation has no idea the impact MJ had on the world. Perhaps in time they will learn.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

How about having the biggest selling album ever? Its been several decades now and nobody else has come close. Thats how big of an impact MJ had.

It was only later that the pedophilia stuff cropped up.. but by then he was already a legend ranking right up there will Elvis, and if it werent for the pedophelia stuff his funeral would be as big as JFK's or John Lennon's (thats assuming it wont be, but it may very well actualy be)

A freakish monster obsessed with surgical modifcations? Yep. Caught in several pedophelia scandals? Yep. One of the biggest musicians ever? Also true.

Re:Poll results

[Xest]

Er, I'm of the "Michael Jackson" generation, except to me he's still forgettable when he's not in the media because of a child molestation case or for dangling a baby over a balcony or for managing to blow hundreds of millions of dollars mostly on tat.

Age has nothing to do with it, it's just whilst all the pop fans were listening to Jacko the rest of us were listening to things like Guns and Roses.

To many of us, the only reason Jacko wasn't forgettable was the fact he was always getting himself in the media by doing something pretty stupid.

I think you'll find it's your assumption that just because you seem to like Michael Jackson that he must universally be liked that's wrong. Not everyone has the same tastes.

If I had to pick some favourite tracks from the 80s then stuff by U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns and Roses, Bon Jovi would come well ahead of anything by Michael Jackson. They're slightly different genres, but frankly if I had to pick something cheesy which is the category I'd personally put Jacko's songs into I'd probably even choose something more catchy and recognisable such as A-ha's "Take on me".

You're welcome to like Jacko, but don't assume everyone else does and assume that if they don't they're from the wrong generation. I distinctly remember even at the time friends were pretty split about him - sure some loved him, but there were still plenty that hated him even when he was in his prime.

Re:Poll results

[itsthebin]

yeah - "he touched a lot of people"

Re:Poll results

[Sponge Bath]

...always getting himself in the media by doing something pretty stupid

His hair catching on fire was a classic. He was an entertainer to the end.

Re:Poll results

[pbhj]

good grief, by any serious consideration of musical talent he was nothing special, made no new contribution to the arts. Hype and marketing success story, sure. But being almost the same age as MJ I can tell you neither I nor any of my friends growing up cared for his music, especially as he spent half his life being a weirdo.

I don't own any Michael Jackson music, nor have I ever been to any of his concerts, etc..

He may not have had any serious musical talent (which pop stars do?), I suspect he did within his genre, but you can't deny that he was an exceptional performer. Perhaps he was just the canvas on which many people painted a performance, however, he was central to that. Perhaps you don't like that style but you've got to appreciate the fact that he's one of the highest selling artistes ever and entertained on stage over about 40 years. That's an achievement.

I'd also think he made substantial contributions to the arts in his performance of some quite novel choreographic sequences- who'd done a zombie dance before thriller!? Who'd seen moonwalking before MJ popularised it.

Re:Poll results

[Sir_Lewk]

Oh screw off, culture and the arts are an important part of defining "who we are" as a race. Without our movies, music, paintings and books we would completely loose our sense of who we are, and where we've been. (books in particular, do you really think the world would not be negatively effected if all of the classics simply ceased to exist over night?)

Re:Poll results

[Draek]

Its not about liking him, its about recognizing the huge influence he had over contemporary and later musicians. Its much like Nirvana, I may personally hate their music (and that statement alone would've been enough to send my karma into the fiery pits of hell, had Slashdot a younger population), but even to me the influence they've had over pretty much anything that calls itself "rock" these days is undeniable. Michael Jackson represented the same thing for pop, so regardless of whether you liked him or not he most certainly wasn't "forgettable".

Re:Poll results

[baap]

Im sorry but this sort of cynicism deserves to be slammed. You being from the Michael Jackson generation and saying that he was mostly hated is not a worthy thing to say to one of the few American entertainers that constituted the ubiquitous symbol of emancipation your country represented to the rest of the world during some pretty hard times. This is a man whose name and music was recognized and appreciated from the somalian pirates to the pashtuns carting RPGs to the Taliban. No im not saying he was the preferred musician for terrorists, the world over but that he provided common ground for the whole world to sing/dance and express themselves. Your limited perception of his phenomenon is testament to the isolation you are in and a refusal to participate in mourning this musical genius. I equate you to the Paparazzi of the Beethoven generation. thanks /\ \/

Re:Poll results

[Hatta]

Michael Jackson on one hand, Guns 'n Roses on the other. No wonder I never liked music as a kid. The 80's were a fucking wasteland. The Talking Heads are the only band from the decade I like, and I didn't discover them until adulthood.

Of course, Junta and Pretty Hate Machine were both released in 1989 so it wasn't *all* bad.

Re:Poll results

[Tanktalus]

How 'bout some empathy for the children he conned into sex acts?

Proof or retract.

How 'bout some disgust for the jaded rich who don't see anyone else as valid and care only for their own pleasure?

I see MJ completely differently. Thrown into the spotlight at 5 years old, he pretty much stopped maturing at that point. His fame (and, later, infamy) and riches meant that he always had "handlers" around to take care of things for him. Without having to do things for himself, he could never mature. He wasn't jaded rich. He was immature rich, and probably not by his own doing.

How 'bout some joy that children are safer by one pedophile now?

Assuming he was one. I kind of doubt it.

How 'bout the realization that singing meaningless crap in a falsetto while dancing self indulgently isn't talent no matter what the industry tells you?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Based on the sales of said meaningless crap, I'd have to conclude that you're wrong. I just happen to (mostly) agree with you. (Not all of it was meaningless, but I digress - I'm not sure what he wrote vs merely sang/performed.)

Re:Poll results

[Attila Dimedici]

If you are comparing Michael Jackson to Guns & Roses, you are not from his generation. I never liked his music (OK, some of the Jackson 5 stuff), but he was a tremendous talent. Those of the "Michael Jackson Generation" might prefer Aerosmith (first album 1972 to MJ's first solo album in 1971), but Guns & Roses (first album 1985) is a later generation. While MJ was still making music when Guns & Roses came along, so was Aerosmith.

Re:Poll results

[Loki_1929]

And thus we see the true colors of our society. So long as you can sing, dance, and entertain the world, molesting children and then paying off their parents to make criminal cases go away is just fine with us. You can even come right out and proclaim in televised interviews that you're carrying on inappropriate relationships with children; we'll still either deny or ignore it.

I see all this outpouring of sympathy all over the web for a pedophile who molested children with impunity for years on end and all I can think is that all those Catholic priests should have taken some classes at an art school before doing what they did as it probably would have saved the church some money. I don't care how well you sing or dance. I don't care if you cure Cancer. The moment you start molesting children, society should throw you to the wolves.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

I formally charge you with pedophilia. You have done so with impunity for years on end. You should be thrown to the wolves.

Certainly the accusation is there in the case of Michael Jackson, but he remained unconvicted, just like you.

Re:Poll results

[MightyMartian]

He could sing, he could dance, he was a damned good writer of pop songs (let me just say I'm not a big fan of pop music in general, and I was no Jackson fan). People seem to forget that some of the big hits, in particular Billie Jean (which is probably up there with She Loves You and Good Vibrations as being one of the most of the successful and influential pop songs) were songs he wrote.

The story of Billie Jean is actually kind of interesting. It was his breakout hit that pretty much defined him as an international pop star, as opposed to a Motown star or black star. It was a musically sophisticated song with some pretty weird lyrics. Quincy Jones didn't even want to release the song, and he and Jackson nearly fell out over it, and yet Jackson, before he became the next Howard Hughes, was a damned savvy operator who knew even better than Jones that this was going to be THE song, and it does, whether we like it, pretty much define pop music in the early 1980s.

In general, his achievement with Thriller really does put him up there with Elvis, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac as one of the most successful recording artists of all time. Thriller has moved over a hundred million units. It's a staggering number.

Re:Poll results

[flyneye]

No retraction. He merely bought off the civil cases. Any moron knows what happened,let alone wise men.
          I'm sure you see him through rose colored glasses. Take them off. He's an ugly little troll.
          Based on sales of meaningless crap indeed. The music industry only ONLY calls an act talent if they have the talent to market said act. The rest is advertising hyperbole. The general public likes anything it's told to for the convenience of the industry to market it. No talent required, none seen. There was a time you could put on an organ grinder monkey suit, shrill falsetto, dance self indulgently and the industry had someone who could market that.That spells sales. Sales based on a talented marketing division not a monkey.
          No matter how much you polish it a turd is a turd. Market it correctly and the public will have a popular new exciting taste sensation. You've been had. Go brush the crap off your teeth.
God, I'll bet you think he actually had something to do with writing any of the songs he recorded.
The man was so socially retarded he could barely do anything towards personal care that you or I do ourselves everyday. Don't expect he made any relevant career decisions on his own. He was a brand name and that's all. He was used by others as a cash cow and built his own wealth that way.
If not for that he would probably be just another citizen doing prison time for molestation.
       

Re:Poll results

[Xest]

Well, most people talk about stuff like Thriller, Smooth Criminal, Billie Jean etc.

It wasn't until the mid 80s that Jackson really peaked which is around the same time that GnR came about which is why the comparison. The earlier stuff wasn't anywhere near as popular and most Jackson fans almost certainly didn't become so until the mid 80s, that's probably why the 80s are commonly referred to as being the period that defines the Jackson generation because it was the period that really defined his career.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

From what I gather, he admited to sharing a bed. Didn't realize that that was active pedophilia.

Based on your required level of evidence, I hereby accurately state that you are an active pedophile currently engaged in molesting children, after all I can quote you verbatim as saying..

"I've admitted to inappropriate relationships with young boys"

Re:Poll results

[Ant P.]

No retraction. He merely bought off the civil cases. Any moron knows what happened,let alone wise men.

Obviously you are a pedophile and serial killer then, since you can't buy me out.

*sigh*

[vertinox]

I hate to say this, but things like this (and Anna Nichole Smith) make me weep for humanity.

We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.

Do you think world would have paid as much attention to Stephen Hawking if he died?

I'd doubt it but he's probably made a greater contribution to mankind over the long term compared to MJ.

Secondly, MJ kind of screwed the pooch when it came to financial responsibility. The guy was known to publicly throw tantrums at his personal assistants when they told him to stop buying everything in the store and spent millions on stuff like paintings, statues, and luxuries that none of us could ever afford.

Hell... For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries. The guy is not a hero and we should not look to him for inspiration. Plenty of other people in streets of Iran to look for that.

Re:*sigh*

[slyn]

For the a lot of people who grew up during his heyday, Michael Jackson was "The King of Pop". As a singer/performer, he helped define a genre during his time. People remember the emotions of getting pumped up before a game to a song, or losing their virginity to a song, or getting through a rough time with a song. Those emotional attachments create powerful memories and connections.

When my grandfather died my mom listened to the same Yanni CD for like 12 months straight and it never occurred to me why until like 4 years later when I made the connection that that was what we would always listen to on our weekly visits to the nursing home, and that the songs soothed her and helped her cope with the loss. Because of that, Yanni (whose music I'm not even a fan of) evokes a pretty strong emotion to me, and a much stronger emotion from my mom. The completely intangible feelings that music can give you can feel _more_ tangible or be more rememberable than the changes to our lives brought about by the achievements of some guy in a lab, even if those lab achievements mean far more to mankind in the long or short run.

Re:*sigh*

[sootman]

For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries.

Score: -1, factually incorrect. From USA Today's coverage:

Jackson had a huge soft spot for charitable causes. He gave millions of his own money and helped raise millions more to support advocacy groups ranging from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to the American Cancer Society. His efforts prompted a listing in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records for most charities supported by a pop star. [emphasis mine]

He donated $1.5 million to a burn center, the proceeds from a settlement he received from PepsiCo after sustaining second-degree burns to his scalp while filming a 1984 TV commercial for the soft-drink giant. Later that year, he donated an additional $5 million to charity from his share of the Jackson 5's Victory Tour. Also that year, he was honored by President Reagan for his contributions to combat drug and alcohol abuse.

Jackson also co-wrote with Lionel Richie We Are the World, the star-laden 1985 single that sold 20 million copies, raising millions for famine relief.

Cloud

[Martz]

What if everyone uses Cloud hosting?

The Cloud works for some customers because they are depending on under-utilization of the available resources. If all the news agenices, Twitter and Facebook all used Amazon then perhaps it would create the same melt down.

Re:Cloud

[SatanicPuppy]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Right now these sites have to spend a certain amount of cash to prepare for these types of events. If they were all "in the cloud" then they wouldn't bother with that extra capacity...The cloud can cover it, right?

As soon as some generalized event comes along that saturates a number of big "cloud" subscribers, then the whole system is going to be heavily taxed, not just a few individual sites, and by the very nature of the "cloud" thing, that will affect a wide number of sites outside the sites that would otherwise be affected.

You're going to have to sell me on redundancy before you can get me to buy into magical cloud land.

Re:Cloud

[ezzzD55J]

from the blogpost:

why elasticity is so important when architecting your web application stack

while probably technically with merit, sentences, verbiage like this make me want to be sick. exorcist sick.

Re:in other news???

[elrous0]

All I can say is Mark Sanford had better send flowers.

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[v1]

Someone that popular is "news for anybody", regardless of who you are. Maybe to a lesser degree for some, but still.

My Pet Project Will Save Everything

[hardburn]

This wouldn't have happened if they had my poorly-defined buzzword idea!

Cloud in Neverland Fantasy

[syousef]

Cloud computing pundits seem to ramble about instant on access and scalability. Nice fantasy. What they actually want to do is make you buy into a single vendor system that's tightly controlled, which may or may not scale as expected when the time comes and that is plagued by the same outages we see from any service vendor.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[3.5 stripes]

Supposedly cloud computing is "on demand" so, having more resources available when you need them (though who knows if it'll help in cases where bandwidth is a limitation) should resolve a lot of these problems. It'd probably also be a sort of intermediary, a cloud of caching servers, leaving the main servers to update the cloud..

Take that with as much salt as you feel it needs.

Personal View

[BigBlueOx]

Oh man. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett dead on the same day. What a sad day for humanity. How will we cope? I keep checking the news outlets to see what Angelina Jolie has to say about all this.

Hey! What ever happened to that Ir-whatever thing? You know. Irast or Irag or something. You know. People marching about something somewhere. Whatever happened to that? Did Angelina Jolie ever comment?

Re:Personal View

[rezac]

When Farrah Fawcett arrived at heaven, God granted her one wish. She wished for all the children in the world to be safe. So God killed Michael Jackson

Re:A sad and happy day

[ripnet]

Michael Jackson wants to be buried at sea, preferably attached to two buoys

What's the difference between Michael Jackson and Alex Ferguson?  Ferguson will be playing Giggs in August

His family have decided to have his body melted and turned into toys. It will give kids the chance to play with him for a change.

He did manage to whisper one thing to the paramedics on the way to the hospital "get me into a children's ward"

Monkey for sale, house trained, can dance a bit, contact never never land USA

Reports of his death are incorrect. He's been found in a children's ward having a stroke.

Apparently it wasn't a stroke, but skin cancer...Don't blame it on the sunshine..

I thought they were melting him down in to cups so that kids could still get their lips around his rim?

Michael Jackson didn't actually die of a heart attack................It was food poisoning from eating 15 year old nuts.

Out of respect, McDonalds have released the Mc Jackson burger, 50 year old meat between 10 year old buns...

It was touch and go in the Hospital, and that was just on the Children's ward....

MJ's ghost has been seen walking the wards of a Children's hospital. Looks like he will continue to try and put the willies up small children.

They released candle in the wind for Princess Diana. Apparently they are releasing Rolf Harris' 2 little boys for Jackson.

Jackson has cancelled his upcoming dates. They were James aged 9 and Tom 11.

On his death bed Michael Jackson requested that his ashes be packaged into a box of Rice Krispies, It is believed that this is so that he can have the feeling of going through a ten year old's @rse one last time

In a tribute to the late Michael Jackson, his close friend Rolf Harris will be doing two little boys at his funeral

Elton John will be playing at his funeral - "Don't Let Your Son Go Down on Me"...

His body was found slumped over a pram he had apparently tripped over.  A police spokesman said it was too early to determine whether they should blame it on the buggy.

Los Angeles police have now been round to Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch following his death. It is being reported that they found Class A drugs in his kitchen, Class B drugs in his bathroom and Class 4C in his bedroom.

MJ passed away at 3:15am. Which is ironically when the big hand touches the little hand.

Jockeys this weekend will wear black armbands in remembrance of MJ, who has successfully ridden more 3 year olds than anyone else.

Its Princess Diana all over again

[mseeger]

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

I can't believe people care about this!

[FatalTourist]

I am going to write a whiny, holier-than-thou post on the Internet to let everyone know that I know there are more important things in the world: starving children, Iran, etc. There you go, my sweet ego...

autopsy footage already available!

[ayahner]

I can't believe they got the autopsy footage bootlegged and on the interwebs so fast...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5830866813023883728

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[larry bagina]

CmdrTaco died? I know he didn't like "naval [sic] gazing", but I think that's valid slashdot news.

RIP, Rob Malda.

I felt a great disurbance in the '80s Force,

[circletimessquare]

as if millions of sequined gloves and nippleated red swimsuits cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened, and the '80s will never be the same again.

Well. If it had been posted to a newsgroup

[Colin Smith]

The news would have been everywhere with minimal bandwidth consumed.

Basically, the webserver concept is broken for really big traffic.

Of course, the problem with usenet is it's too efficient. People can post crap too easily and get others to pay for it.
 

He was a childhood idol to many

[phorm]

I remember that when I was young, MJ was very much an idol to many people my age. Who says we're looking to him for inspiration - or even as a role-model - in this day and age? No, it's the passing of something from our youth. We mourn what he was, not what he had become.

And yes, if Stephen Hawking passed I'd imagine it would still be a fairly big event as well.

The human race dissapoints me once again

[damburger]

The twitterverse has spontaneously shifted from being a (supposed) forum for Iranian democracy to a Michael Jackson tribute site. News sites reporting the death of this one man, this self-obsessed child molester with a surgery fetish, have been swamped with traffic whilst sites reporting the deaths of thousands of innocent people never have any problem coping with traffic: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1

I am an atheist, believing in no life after this one, and the upshot of this is I find all human life to have indefinite value - indefinite but basically equal. If you are mourning right now and your surname isn't "Jackson", then it is a direct affront to those who die through no fault of their own and are implicitly disregarded by the rest of the world during the absurd rituals we employ to mark the death of somebody famous.

I don't believe in human nature or historical inevitability. I believe in free will, and thus I believe people have a choice. Masses of people have made the wrong choice, and it makes me both sad and angry. The reaction to Michael Jackson's death, rather than the death itself, has put a real downer on my day.