Celebrity Death Rally brings Google and Wikipedia to a halt

A huge surge of traffic from surfers searching for news of Michael Jackson’s death brought down three of the internet’s biggest sites last night.The death news about farrah fawcett and some rumors about the death of jeff goldblum also contributed to this.

Search engine Google was unavailable to some users for over half an hour due to the weight of traffic.According to Google Trends, seven of the top 10 most popular searches today were related to Jackson in some way.In its "hotness" gauge, Google describes searches for "Michael Jackson died" as "volcanic".

Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia also succumbed soon after news broke that the King of Pop had been taken ill, with a number of conflicting reports of Jackson's condition causing a short editing war between users.

The server for social network Twitter also crashed, with monitoring site TweetVolume reporting that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Tweets within an hour of the first reports that the star had been rushed to hospital.

Shortly after breaking the news, the sites tmz.com and latimes.com went down as they were the first to break this news

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