A huge surge of traffic from surfers searching for news of Michael Jacksons death brought down three of the internets biggest sites last night.
Search engine Google was unavailable to some users for over half an hour due to the weight of traffic.
According to Google Trends, seven of the top 10 most popular searches today were related to Jackson in some way.
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In its "hotness" gauge, Google describes searches for "Michael Jackson died" as "volcanic".
Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia also succumbed soon after news broke that the King of Pop had been taken ill, with a number of conflicting reports of Jackson's condition causing a short editing war between users.
