The Web Collapses Under The Weight Of Michael Jackson’s Death | Hacker News Reader

The Web Collapses Under The Weight Of Michael Jackson’s Death

techcrunch.com

23 pointsblazamos11 comments

Summary: The web according to TechCrunch (apparently Twitter, TMZ and Perez Hilton's blog) went down. Everything being talked about on the web (which is full represented by twitter's "trending topics") was Michael Jackson.

This is garbage.

The only redeeming factor was the googlemapsapi tweet. Apparently Google's "don't be evil" motto doesn't extend to their marketing. The tweet: http://twitter.com/googlemapsapi/status/2334341646

Add Wikipedia to that list.

By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties... Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))"

from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10273277-93.html.

Yet again techcrunch gets it wrong. Twitter and TMZ don't constitute 'The Web'. As long as HN is up, the web must be ok ;)

stay classy google: http://twitter.com/googlemapsapi

can't believe i actually linked to twitter. here's the actual content they posted:

"Sad about MJ & FF? Cheer up by watching some Geo I/O talks: http://bit.ly/11aXr3

I'm sorry, but I think that tweet is unbelievably tasteless.

I'll just have to take the down votes.

  Sorry about that last tweet -- it was in bad taste and we apologize.
  half a minute ago from web

Heh. PR blunder cycles at Twitter speed! Or as Arrington might say, "in real-time".

Also... http://twitter.com/pamelafox/status/2335617763

The people behind corporate Twitter accounts are, well, people too, and they make mistakes like the rest of us. I know Pamela and she actually is a nice person.

Perhaps someone should create a service that allows the PR dept to "approve" tweets before they go live...

sachinag's tweet: Wow, someone's getting fired

Pamela's reply: my personal apologies - that wasnt the intention of the tweet. i retract.

Yes, I'm pretty sure she wasn't trying to get fired...sorry, I just thought it was funny she said it that way.

Our site was hit pretty badly, and we saw the highest-ever number of mentions of a person on Twitter (22% of all tweets over a 30-minute window):

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=michael%20jackson&s...

I clicked the link and now I feel dirty. When will I stop clicking on linkbait headlines?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com