News of Michael Jackson's death swamps news sites

Updated at 4.40pm (US time) with comment from Google and at 5.35pm (US time) with information about CBS' own traffic surge, and at 6.46pm (US time) with statistics from Keynote Systems.

(Credit: CNET News)
The traffic numbers are beginning to roll in now and it appears online news sites fared poorly in handling a flash flood of traffic following the death of singer Michael Jackson.

Keynote Systems, a company that tracks site performance, is reporting that a review of the more than 30 online news services the firm covers, shows that availability on average fell from 100 percent to 86 percent. The average time it took to access the home pages of top media sites jumped from 4.2 seconds to 8.9 seconds.

Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, said that among the sites who saw the biggest drop offs in performance were ABCNews.com, Latimes.com and CBSnews.com.

"ABCNews.com went as low as 11 percent availability for almost 2 hours," White said.

When news of the iconic performer's death began trickling out, scores of people turned to the Web for news. TMZ broke the news that Jackson, 50, known for producing some of the world's bestselling records, including Thriller and Bad, had died Thursday afternoon, but the gossip hub cited only unnamed sources and offered few details. As other news services turned their attention to the story and as the public took to the Web to learn more about the performer's condition, some Web sites began slowing down.

Some Google users complained that the search engine's News area was inaccessible for a time.

A Google representative confirmed that "between approximately 2.40pm PDT (10.40pm GMT) and 3.15pm PDT (11.15pm GMT) today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson."

CNN.com appeared to be sluggish delivering Jackson stories at times. In its defense, the news organization said that the site saw 20 million page views and a fivefold increase in just over an hour (from where it was prior to when news about Jackson's death began widely circulating).

Even before Jackson's death, Thursday was a big day for news sites as word of actress Farrah Fawcett's death hit the wires in the morning and continued interest in the scandal surrounding South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The traffic deluge came swiftly and lasted for about a half hour, according to internal data here at CNET News, which saw twice the normal amount of hourly traffic shortly after word of Jackson's death spread. At sister site CBSNews.com, traffic numbers were five times their normal levels.