News Server Meltdown 2009

Reading some news reports revealed some interesting statistics today. The news of Michael Jackson's recent death triggered a wide spread traffic spike on news servers. Larger corporates such as ABC, CBC, and the L.A. times were more or less down for the count. At one point only 10% of visitors were able to view there news articles. The demand lasted for about 2 hours and did not settle back to high-normal levels until late evening.

Google's report on their official blog is also very interesting. While the server farm itself didn't have any trouble serving up pages another issue cropped up. Google recieved such a sudden eruption of requests that anyone searching was presented with the "We're Sorry" message. Fortunatly the incident only lasted for 25 minutes.

Here is the graph from Google's blog:



I admit I'm curious what the scale up the left side is supposed to be, but that is a really high peak in searches for Michael.