If it were a hurricane, it would have been a Category 5. This was the “big one.” The death of Michael Jackson drove online viewership to near record highs (only to be surpassed by the Inauguration of President Barack Obama) and brought several prominent news sites to a screeching halt. While it may be impossible to accurately estimate exactly how many people watched the events worldwide, we know that most sites experienced at least a 20 percent increase above normal. This created a snowball effect that nearly brought the Internet to its knees.
Check out these statistics:
• 30% of all “tweets” were about Michael Jackson according to Venturebeat
• Google actually thought it was under attack the traffic was so overwhelming
• AOL reported that AIM was down for 40 minutes
• The LA Times traffic spiked to 2.3 million page views in one hour
• Facebook traffic increased threefold
• CNN.com reported 9.7 million video streams of the memorial service
While many news outlets buckled under the pressure, some of the Internet’s top sites fared better at handling the onslaught of traffic. TMZ.com, which broke the news on June 25, 2009, performed well from the day the news hit through the memorial service. Additionally, ABCNews.com said that the company saw “no dips in performance” as a result of the increased traffic.
At Digitalsmiths, we manage the digital media operations for today’s leading studios, broadcasters, distributors and publishers. When a major news event hits (or in this case, series of events), the demands on our systems can skyrocket exponentially. In fact, during this time, we experienced an increase in traffic on the order of five times our previous peak.
As expected, our systems handled the surge well because we have an industrial-strength architecture and infrastructure that are purpose-built for the most demanding and dynamic digital media environments. In addition, our operations and processes are optimized to manage huge swings in traffic to ensure that every video is easy to access, view and search.
I invite you to comment and look forward to reading your thoughts on this important and timely topic.
Sincerely,
Matt Berry
