Michael Jackson Nearly Brought Down the Internet

A report from VentureBeat:

The Internet was built to withstand nuclear attack. That was why it was built in the ’60s in the first place, as a communications system with redundancy built in so that the military could communicate even if one of the nodes went down.

We saw some of that happen today, as news of Michael Jackson’s death spread like wildfire through the Internet. TMZ.com got the scoop about Jackson being sent to the hospital. But the site went down from the surge of traffic. The LA Times reported he was in a coma, but then that site went down too. The LA Times managed to report that Jackson was dead, and then everyone else started buzzing about it. Twitter went down. Keynote Systems, which measures web site performance, said that the following sites all slowed significantly: ABC, AOL, LA Times, CNN Money and CBS. Starting at 230 pm PST, the average load time for a news site slowed from 4 seconds to 9 seconds.

This is not supposed to happen....

And yet networks still buckle under the weight of traffic when something like today’s events shakes the whole world. Mobile networks are particularly weak, as AT&T’s activation problems related to the launch of the iPhone 3G S showed. In some ways, the servers worked today. As one site went down, another picked up the torch. But the transitions were rocky. The promise of utility computing is that you will be able to switch on and off server capacity as if you were switching on and off your lights.

And that leads me to consider the future. As tragic as Michael Jackson’s death is, it’s only a small taste of what would happen in a true calamity. If the servers go down, how are we going to get our Gmail or Yahoo Mail? Who will be there to listen when we collectively Tweet for help? What will we do if the emergency plan is stored on the network?

It’s a wake-up call for the web, and for those who are building its infrastructure and plumbing for it.

There's more information in the story about attempts the industry has taken to handle large volumes of traffic.

I was trying to report and research the story via my cellphone from a moving train and had lots of problems doing it. My phone's browser wouldn't go to the right home page, and I saw later that some of my tweets on the subject were posted by Twitter in the wrong order, probably because of backed-up traffic at their site.

This was a worldwide story, so millions if not billions of people were all trying to get information at the same time. In the event of another 9/11 style attack, would these networks be able to handle the load, or would we all find ourselves sitting with useless computers and phones and no information?

I hope the powers-that-be will study this event and plan accordingly.