Michael Jackson is the new DDoS

As I am digging my way out of my RSS feeds after a summer hiatus, here comes an interesting story on how a surge of interest following Michael Jackson's death made some news sites suspect they are under a DDoS attack.

Google, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, Twitter and especially gossip site TMZ, which broke the news initially, went down briefly in a burst of cyber-flames as their websites were hit by a massive burst of traffic.

The traffic on Twitter rivaled the peak of the communication the day after the illegitimate Iran election. The BBC thought it was under a DDoS attack at first, as many hordes of Internet-goers searched the site for news on beloved MJ.

Even mighty Google News, for roughly a half an hour, returned error pages as their service was overloaded with folks searching for the most recent updates on Michael Jackson's status.

...which proves again that we shouldn't simply blame the fact that a site is unavailable on the evil Russian/Chinese/Iranian hackers. Sometimes, downtime is just downtime. Even more so during wartime...Or for that matter after Michael Jackson's death.