Michael Jackson death grinds worldwide internet access to a halt

Internet sites including search giant, Google collapsed under pressure last night as millions used online sources to verify the rumours Michael Jackson had died.

Google confirmed to the BBC it feared it was the victim of a cyber attack on a global scale as it was forced to post up the following warning to anyone who Googled the star's name: “...your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware applications”.

Between 2.40pm and 3.15pm Pacific time, Google trend pages displayed a huge Search Volume index peak labelled by the search engine as being on “volcanic” proportions. Similarly, microblogging service Twitter collapsed under the weight of users online. The BBC reported (before Twitter crashed) “Michael Jackson” related Tweets appeared more than 66,500 times. Web analysts Trendrr meanwhile, estimated the number of Tweets containing “Michael Jackson” averaged more than 100,000 per hour.

Online encylopedia, Wikipedia also fell victim to the hysteria as its editors struggled to monitor updates on the star's entry.

Meanwhile, Keynote Systems reported serious performance problems for AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo websites. Keynote director of external operations, Shawn White, explained: “...the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds...during the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100 per cent to 86 per cent.”

All of the websites in question are now operating smoothly.