The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death. - BBC.co.uk
Search giant Google confirmed that when the news first broke it  feared it as under attack.
Millions of people who searched for the star's name on Google News were greeted with an error page.
It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".
"It's true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.
It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead.
Google's trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called "hotness" gauge the topic was rated "volcanic".
Fail
Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public's clamour for information.
The micro blogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service.
Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches. But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its well-known outages.
Before the company's servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates. 
According to initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts Thursday afternoon containing "Michael Jackson" totalled more than 100,000 per hour.
That put news of Jackson's death at least on par with the Iran protests, as Twitter posts about Iran topped 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour.
TMZ, the popular celebrity gossip site that broke the story following a tip-off that a paramedic had visited the singers home also crashed.
There was a domino effect as users then fled to other sites. With Hollywood gossip writer Perez Hilton's site was among those to flame out and also problems for the web sites of AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo.
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