The extraordinary volume of searches by the name of the singer Michael Jackson on the Internet has led Google to interpret this phenomenon as a “cyber attack”. Instead of a list of results, millions of users who typed the name of Michael Jackson in the bar of the site have encountered the error message “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.

“It is true that in the afternoon between approximately 2:40 a.m. to 3:15 a.m. (local time), users of Google News had difficulty in accessing the results of searches for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page”, confirmed Gabriel Stricker from Google.

Around that time, the singer was being declared dead at a hospital in Los Angeles.
The volume of searches on the Internet for news about Michael Jackson caused a series of delays. The Keynote Systems, which monitors traffic on the network, reported performance problems on news sites such as AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo.

“From 2:30 a.m. local time, the average speed of download on news sites doubled from less than four seconds for almost nine seconds,” said the the director, Shawn White, from external operations of the site Data Center Knowledge.

“In the same period, the average availability of sites has dropped from almost 100% to 86%.”

Other sites recorded failures. Among them are the TMZ, specializing in celebrities and gossip, which left the air because of the number of attempts to access their exclusive news that paramedics were called to the home of Michael Jackson, as well the celebrity gossip page of the journalist Perez Hilton.

Via: BBC.