After Michael Jackson’s shocking death has been reported to the public, loyal fans around the world streamed to social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to discuss about his death and praise how good his music were. Many were in a state of shock and praying tribute to the King of Pop. A few hours ago before he kicked the bucket, the number of fans in his Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/michaeljackson) was hovering around 800,000. However, as the message spreads rapidly to the entire social web, an increasing number of people has become his fan on the world’s most popular social networking website and it has just surged past the 1 million mark.
Increasing at a phenomenal rate of about 10 fans a second, it took “him” just over a day to garner nearly 200,000 Facebookers to become his fan. Not only does his Facebook page has attracted a lot of attention, his YouTube’s video channel has also boosted from 100,000 to around 148,000+ subscribers. As for his MySpace page, he has close to 255,000 friends. Unfortunately, he doesn’t owns a Twitter profile.
His death was so influential that many users on social networking platforms have complained about the slow page load. Akamai said that traffic to news Web sites spiked around 6 p.m. Eastern, clocking in at one point at 4.2 million visitors per minute. During the rest of the day, the sites tracked by Akamai never exceeded 3 million visitors per minute.  Even Internet users have difficulty accessing Google search results for queries related to Michael Jackson. However, fortunately none of the platforms has crashed. A similar incident has happened during Barack Obama’s Presidential election, especially on the final day itself.