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As some of you may have noticed yesterday, RantRave was down for a good 30 minutes yesterday. This was caused by the same thing that took down the rest of the internet - the death of Michael Jackson.
I had been following the story pretty closely and did my best to get a post up as soon as I saw a semi-official announcement. By my account, RantRave was the first Google News provider to definitely state that he had passed away. The post was on Google News for about 90 seconds, before the site went down. In those 90 seconds, we received 1800 hits.
At first, I thought this was unique to our site, but I read last night and today that Michael Jackson basically took down the entire online world. Twitter was down, Facebook was nearly taken down, Wikipedia received 500 edits, and was "temporarily overloaded." CNN states they had a 5-fold increase in traffic, receiving 20 million visitors the hour the story broke.
Then there were rumors of other celebrity deaths, including Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum. 'Nerds the World' posted on Goldblum, which also caused our site to slow to a near stop.
It was a very strange day, here at RantRave.
(In case you're wondering, the last time the internet was nearly halted was for Obama's Inauguration.)