Since the death of the pop legend Michael Jackson, the traffic on various websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc is off the charts and many time overloaded the websites, resulting in temporary unavailability of the websites.

Akamai, that provides more than 2,185,000 live, on demand streaming videos reports that, Michael Jackson’s memorial that was held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles was perhaps one of the biggest events to hit the online world. According to in-house estimates, the total traffic on Akamai on the day of the memorial services crossed was in excess of 2 terabits per second. With the assistance of Adobe Flash players, Akamai was able to provide its users with 548 Gbps of live and on-demand video flash streams.

The amount of visitors recorded by the website as on 1 pm EST on the day of the memorial service was 3,924,370 users and the count rose to 3.3 million users per minute. This figure is considered to be second in line after the figures that surfaced when the news of Michael Jackson’s death first hit the internet. Even without complete outages of the primary websites, yet a slow landing page times and other difficulties were encountered till the day the memorial services ended.

As per the estimates from Facebook, millions of users from all over the world, posted about 800,000 update messages soon after the news of Michael Jackson’s death broke out. This figure is quite on the terms of the 1.8 million status updates that, included the word “Obama” on  the day he took the oath as the president of The United States.

Via GIGAOM.