Millions of search queries hit Google a few days back, after the king of pop, Michael Jackson died at the age of 50. Google, on the other hand, was overwhelmed by this sudden strike of queries and interpreted the mass fan following as a denial-of-service attack. Since more than millions of search requests were hammered on the Google servers, Google’s anti-botnet mechanisms interpreted this as a massive Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack.

The servers were automatically shut down, to avoid being victim of further attacks, leaving users frustrated with a message reading, “Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.” and no further news and/or results regarding their search queries were displayed. The server outage lasted for about half an hour, and during this time as well, the news spread virally via all of the highest visited Hollywood gossip blogs, SMSs and other means of communications, including social networking websites. Due to this quick spreading of the news, people turned to Google to confirm this news, but in turn were left with incomplete information.

Google wasn’t just the victim of the overflooding of search requests. Micheal Jackson’s official website, MichaelJackson.com, had also temporarily succumbed to the insane traffic running towards it’s website servers. This particular occurrence shows how people today are quite dependent on the E-News and can’t wait for the traditional means of news [T.V and Newspapers] to come up with the same news. Social networking websites, including Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and most importantly, Twitter, faced extreme slowdowns as millions of users posted their condolences on their profiles and group pages. Jackson’s death also dominated Google’s Trends and Twitter’s trending topic lists for hours.

For TechMirage,
Pranav Shirodkar