“But did the internet actually buckle? Well, there was some strain - but it seems to have come through well.

In the United States, a company called Keynote, which monitors internet performance, says popular news sites showed marked slowdowns for three hours from about 2230 BST: “The average speed for downloading news items doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White from Keynote. “During the same period, the average availability of sites dropped from almost 100% to 86%.”

But guess what: in Europe overnight, there was no spike in internet traffic. Interoute, which operates Europe’s largest fibre optic voice and data network, sent me graphs (see below) showing traffic through the three key internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. At all three exchanges, traffic was either around the same as normal overnight, or, in London’s case, actually a little lower.

So what’s going on? Well for one thing, the kind of people who were online late at night may well have decided to leave their computers and turn on the television for the breaking news. Then there’s the fact that much of the increasing traffic across the internet in recent years has been in the form of web video, whereas news of Michael Jackson’s death was spread through less bandwidth-heavy social networking and news sites.

Jonathan Brown of Interoute told me: “The 140 characters in a Twitter message doesn’t really take up a lot of internet traffic. When you have something like Barack Obama’s inauguration - a continuous streaming video coming from one destination which everyone is going to - then you really see a big spike in traffic.”

So individual sites may have struggled for a while to cope with a big surge in traffic. But an internet which is gradually adapting to handle vast amounts of video did not come close to buckling.”