“So many people wanted to verify early reports of the singer’s death that the computers running Google’s news section interpreted the “Michael Jackson” requests as an automated attack for about half an hour.”
✖ Via The Press Association: “Massive web surge as Jackson dies”“Even Google News felt the pressure. A Google spokesperson confirmed: “Some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson.” This difficulty occurred between 10.40pm and 11.15pm UK time. During this period Google News did not go down, but users searching for Michael Jackson related information were asked to verify they were indeed a human and not a computer attempting to launch a spam attack.”
✖ Via The Telegraph: “How did Michael Jackson’s death affect the internet’s performance?” by Emma Barnett, June 26, 2009“Google, on the other hand, began receiving so many searches for news about Jackson that it caused the search engine to believe it was under attack. The site went into self-protection mode, throwing up CAPTCHAs and malware alerts to users trying to find news. A Google spokesperson described the incident as “volcanic” compared to other major news events, confirming that there was a service slowdown for some time.”
✖Via Ars Technica: “Internet groans under weight of Michael Jackson traffic” by Jacqui Cheng, June 26, 2009 (thanks Infoneer).… Then basically it happened that a computer programmed by some humans temporarily identified human activity as virus attacks.
• Jun 26, 2009 link notes tagged: Google Internet communication human machine spam technology virus humor
