This makes me think of events like Michael Jackson's unexpected death. Social websites were crashing or having serious performance issues due to the volume of information being posted in such a short period of time. Users were posting what limited information could be shared on the topic. Unfortunately, searching for information on the big search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo), relevant information was not indexed fast enough to display this breaking news in the top search results.
A day after MJ's death, Google announced they were going to modify their approach.