14 DAY TRIAL // The death of Michael Jackson sent shock waves through the web and many web sites and services couldn't handle the huge interest generated. News outlets, search engines and even AOL's instant messenger went down during the surge in traffic. And with the Michael Jackson Public Memorial Service, coming July 7 at the STAPLES Center in Los Angeles, being broadcast live online, how will the Internet cope?
Last week, as the news began to spread, everyone went online for information. The celebrity gossip blog TMZ, owned by AOL, broke the news and went down shortly after followed by the LA Times blog, which was the second news outlet to confirm the pop superstar's death, and Perez Hilton's popular celebrity blog. That day most of the major news outlets as well as popular blogs experienced a huge spike in traffic which, while most of them were capable of handling, led to some issues with the service, like temporary outages or slowing.
Now a memorial service is planed for July 7 with 17,500 tickets being handed out randomly for the event. The site set up to handle registrations for the drawing attracted a massive 500 million visitors in just the first hour and a half after becoming available. Since then more than 500,000 have registered for a chance to win the tickets.
The event will be streamed online for free though there are no details on what service will be used. But with 500 million visitors just for the announcement page it’s doubtful that any one service will be able to handle the load and most likely all of the major players in online streaming as well as a great number of media sites will broadcast the memorial.
And with Michael Jackson still in trending topics on Twitter, setting sales records on iTunes and monopolizing the media's attention, it's very likely that the public memorial service will set audience records not easily matched for some time to come.