the internet is such a complicated piece
of infrastructure filled with so many
intricate components and constantly
moving parts it comes as no surprise
when occasionally things fall short like
when your favorite ceramics blog returns
a 404 or that one new grounds game just
refuses to load properly these are the
things that come with the package of
being online we sometimes have to make
sacrifices
but these are the things we typically
expect from the more obscure corners of
the web the places that are much more
decentralized and don't have the same
resources that say corporations do you
never really hear about the top websites
going down because they always have some
kind of plan b a backup system to
prevent that
but you would be wrong what if i told
you that there was a time in our modern
world where people didn't have access to
google due to a devastating server crash
that infamous day was june 25th 2009
when michael jackson the king of pop
had died
he's unconscious he's not breathing yes
he's not breathing sir okay and he's not
conscious either
okay tell you this is what's being
reported uh by ktla apparently michael
jackson suffered cardiac arrest this
afternoon he was rushed to ucla medical
center cnn sources are now saying
michael jackson is in a coma sisters
janet and latoya jackson were also at
the hospital as fans texted each other
for information outside
my brother
the legendary king of pot michael
jackson
passed away on thursday june 25th
2009 at 2 26 pm
i don't know what to believe right now
i just want to know what's happening and
i love him so much
and
now he's gone i can't believe that it's
the day the music died this is
definitely something that's going to hit
our generation forever
[Music]
there are those certain moments
throughout history where the entire
world just stops and stares
everyone seems to remember where they
were and what they were doing when man
landed on the moon when john lennon was
murdered
where were you when michael jackson died
i was in the car on a road trip when the
news suddenly came blaring through the
radio
and it hit me like a truck
but for many people they were on google
busy searching to confirm that the
rumors were true trying to find that
last bit of hope that the world's
favorite pop star hadn't suddenly left
us
i mean wasn't he going to be touring
next month
but it didn't matter it seems that even
the internet wasn't ready for the news
of mr jackson's death because for the
next couple of hours it would pretty
much cease to exist
it wasn't just google either aol instant
messenger went down for over 40 minutes
and sites like tmz the los angeles times
yahoo twitter and wikipedia were all
rendered completely useless it was as if
someone just walked in and just flipped
a switch and turned off the internet
when michael left he took all the
world's information with him
just beforehand the internet experienced
traffic it had never seen before higher
than it even was with the recent swine
flu outbreak or even with the death of
70's icon farrah fawcett just hours
before michael's web traffic increased
by 48 in the uk and 11
throughout the entire world but what
exactly happened and how was the
internet not prepared
michael's death was a collective
traumatic experience that in many ways
defined a whole generation it signified
the end of an era and the start of a new
one
it changed the very fabric of our
culture and much like michael himself
changed how we communicate with one
another to come together and become a
more unified world
literally
it changed how we use the internet by
revealing to us its limitations the way
we can improve things technologically
and how we can be sure that such an
outage would never happen again
[Applause]
so where did it all start now this is a
difficult area to pinpoint as the crash
was the result of many different people
flooding many different communities all
at once
it wasn't the fault of just a singular
website in particular
but if we want to get closer to the
answer we need to know who the very
first online source was to break the
news
that would be tmz as their reporters
were camping just outside of ronald
reagan ucla medical center where michael
was taken in his comatose state the
state of michael's health at the time
wasn't exactly new information for his
most dedicated fans many people who even
directly worked with michael in his last
few weeks noticed that something was not
right during the final rehearsals for
the planned this is it to her filmmaker
kenny ortega described michael's
behavior on set and overall health as
very very troubling but when it was
announced that michael had been
airlifted to the hospital in a coma
people truly didn't realize how bad it
actually was
many people remained glued to their tv
sets while many others were still
totally unaware of anything happening at
all
tmz announced the news of michael's
death just 18 minutes after he was
legally pronounced dead by the doctors
but given the reputation tmz had for not
being the most reliable source a game of
telephone quickly followed before people
knew it the los angeles times was now
reporting it which was then picked up by
cnn yahoo and aol news then naturally
more of the public starts to hear about
it because it is no longer coming just
from one source in less than 30 minutes
the story was now being told on the
radio and then on national television
and it was at that point when everyone
knew
given how sudden the nature of his death
was overall people were struck with such
shock many of them found it hard to even
believe
it didn't feel real it felt like a dream
was this just another instance of media
sensationalism
the only place to get all the clearest
information was through web searches and
that was when the internet took a bit of
a turn google trends saw keyword search
traffic for michael jackson that had
literally never been seen before likely
more inquiries than for any other topic
before it in online history
the number of searches was so rapid and
were all so similar google literally
thought that it was under a ddos attack
bringing the entire website's traffic to
a halt and of course all those google
searches are what redirected folks to
the sites they were looking for tmz's
article on the event received an
insurmountable rise in traffic obviously
the web servers could not handle all
this rapid homogeneous looking traffic
promptly taking the entire website down
with an entire source now inaccessible
people then flocked to other websites to
get their information cnn was followed
with their traffic increasing five-fold
their article on michael alone would
reach to 20 million views in just one
hour also facing intense network
interruption twitter was returning fail
whales to users when michael started
making up 15
of all tweets at that time
it seemed that everyone had the reverse
midas touch and then resorted to more
secondary sources like perez hilton's
blog but not even that could withstand
this internet tidal wave it only took
around an hour for the world to
accidentally ddos all the web's biggest
news sites take down an entire search
engine and essentially break the
internet
it's hard to imagine that something as
simple as a search query was able to
cause such havoc across the virtual
world
i mean this was 2009 not 1999. could you
really still say that the internet was
too new to know any better
well yes you can
you have to remember that the internet
ages much faster than real life 2009
feels like it was pretty recent but in
internet years that's like dinosaurs
things had changed drastically since it
entered the mainstream space in the 90s
but there was very much still
communities out there planting their
roots and trying to discover themselves
and the same thing can be said about the
technological aspects as well let's
first try to understand how a ddos
attack works in very simple terms a ddos
attack is when you have a bunch of
computers sending information what we
call packets over to a single server all
at the same time okay simple enough but
how do we know the difference between a
ddos attack and actual legitimate
traffic for a website that is simply
just popular i mean google alone gets
around 63 000 searches a second how are
they not just under a permanent ddos
attack well thankfully computers can
quite easily tell the difference ddos
packets typically contain the bare
minimum amount of information needed and
exhibit very basic uniform qualities
in short in your typical ddos attack all
the requests pretty much look the same
whereas with regular traffic you get
people searching all kinds of things and
with that in mind websites are typically
trained over time to see which kind of
queries are high but natural and which
are just flat out unnatural
michael jackson getting thousands of
searches per hour isn't unusual he's an
insanely popular figure
but when he died that number rose to 5
million
not only statistically significant and
unusual but literally never seen before
in internet history up until that point
suddenly google is getting
astronomically high search volumes for
the same basic keyword michael jackson
showing very similar behavior to a ddos
attack and things just don't look right
to save bandwidth google's instincts
kick in and it blocks the traffic
altogether effectively shutting it down
but why the internet for such a
historical decade defining event you
would imagine people would just be
catatonic glued to the tv and radio well
if the answer wasn't already obvious the
internet literally gave us the entire
world at her fingertips this has
arguably made us as humans more
impatient and hungrier for information
if someone doesn't like what the tv is
saying about a subject they can just go
online and learn about it somewhere else
a privilege not as common before the
internet was around but there actually
is more to it than that and it has to do
with one of the negative side effects
that came with the creation of the
internet misinformation it was no longer
limited to just a handful of companies
in charge of telling the news with the
internet everyone is the news and anyone
can say anything that they want it was
not uncommon for celebrity death hoaxes
to start popping up everywhere because
of someone just trying to play a
practical joke online
snopes.com eventually tracked a lot of
these down to a website that lets you
type in a celebrity name and then
generate a convincing webpage for their
death consequently it wasn't uncommon
for people outside the internet to fall
for these hoaxes considering that the
first source was tmz which was known for
being questionable and borderline
salacious many people who may have even
been in denial about michael's death
would have gone online to the more
trusted reputable websites for
confirmation thereby flooding the
internet
the misinformation wouldn't stop after
michael's death however as a ton of
wikipedia vandalism surrounding the
subject would surface as well
as you would have guessed wikipedia
servers also crashed as it had just
received the highest number of visitors
in the site's history but more
celebrities are going to die eventually
how do we prevent the internet from ever
doing something like this ever again
well there's a good chance we probably
can't but we can take measures to combat
it and significantly lessen the severity
there are methods for preventing ddos
attacks and it's through the use of cdn
servers short for content delivery
network cdns are designed to make the
delivery of information as quick and
efficient as possible so when a ddos
attack is happening it will take all the
packets targeted at that one server and
redistribute them to multiple other
servers that deliver them to the same
destination that way a crash doesn't
happen because of a very higher than
normal traffic
and if a crash were to happen the cdn
could also host a cached version of the
site a sort of bare-bones screenshot
version that allows the user to get the
information they desire
now cdn servers obviously did exist
before but it can be argued that michael
jackson's death did highly emphasize
their importance wikipedia also put in
measures afterwards creating something
called pull counter a tool designed to
intentionally limit the amount of users
coming in to prevent massive wastage of
cpu power a term was even coined for
this strange phenomenon of insanely high
internet traffic called the michael
jackson effect while we aren't
guaranteed to prevent such an incident
from ever happening again
we have at least prepared ourselves to
make things less detrimental
on that thursday afternoon not only did
we lose one of the most influential
icons of the 20th century but we
realized there was so much more to the
internet that we didn't know
we learned a lot and we continue
learning every day
so how many people does it truly take to
shut down the internet
well with its technology constantly
changing there's no way to know for sure
but according to cnn all it takes is
just one person if that person is
michael jackson
[Music]
uh
[Music]