Among the many internet casualties yesterday following news of Michael Jackson’s death was AOL’s Instant Messenger, which suffered forty minutes of outage due to unprecedented levels of traffic. AOL released this statment in response:
Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth. Historically, celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviors – searching, sharing and reacting to the news followed by online tributes has become the modern way to mourn. Princess Diana was the first notable Internet example. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are the latest.
That’s a healthy dose of hyperbole, no doubt, but I think they’re onto something. Consider these other downright staggering statistics:
- Twitter saw an instant doubling of tweets-per-second when the story broke
- Google’s architecture had its automatic CAPTCHA security system triggered because the intense traffic spike resembled a distributed denial of service attack
- Akamai recorded a 50% increase in internet traffic by 6:30pm
- The internet on the whole, if viewed from a baseline of 100% availability, fell to an 86% level of availability
The last time the internet suffered such a massive blow was on Sept. 11, an event which differed from yesterday’s news by virtue of the fact that core components of the underlying network infrastructure were actually damaged in the attack.
What is more striking, though, is that news of the attacks took some time to spread; the entire world didn’t find out at once as it did yesterday. I remember that it wasn’t for a solid hour after the first plane struck that my parents had to panic about their son’s safety. My sister, on her honeymoon at the time, didn’t face that same dread until later in the afternoon. This is despite the fact that in the case of Sept. 11 an actual event took place with actual eyewitnesses and tangible evidence, as compared to yesterday’s unverifiable scoop on TMZ.com.
And I think this is why AOL was actually quite on point with their hyperbole: the entire world learned about Jackson’s death at exactly the same moment. In terms of communication, information, knowledge, and shared experiences, the event which occured yesterday at 5:40pm unfolded with a higher degree of instantaneity than has ever been witnessed before in human history. Time and space have never been more fully compressed.
While I should probably find this all very heartwarming and launch into some congratulatory thesis about the “information revolution” bringing us all closer together, I’m afraid it all just strikes me as deeply unsettling. Humanity decided yesterday, in the most cooperative, collaborative, and collective decision that it has ever made, that Michael Jackson was the figure who would sit at the center of this “seminal moment in history”.
As horror looks you right between the eyes, indeed.
