- [Narrator] 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 Newgrounds 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.
- [911 Operator] He's unconscious, he's not breathing?
- [Caller] Yes. He's not breathing, sir.
- [911 Operator] Okay, and he's not conscious either?
He's not breathing? - No, he's not conscious, sir.
- [News Anchor] I can tell you,
this is what's being reported by KTLA.
Apparently, Michael Jackson
suffered cardiac arrest this afternoon.
He was rushed to UCLA Medical Center.
- [News Anchor] CNN sources are now saying
Michael Jackson is in a coma.
- [News Anchor] Sisters Janet and Latoya Jackson
were also at the hospital
as fans texted each other for information outside.
- [Crowd] Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael!
- My brother, the legendary King of Pop, Michael Jackson,
passed away on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 2:26 PM.
- I don't know what to believe right now.
I just wanna know what's happening.
- And I love him so much and now he's gone.
I can't believe that.
- It's the day that music died.
This is definitely something
that's gonna hit our generation forever.
(soft music)
- [Narrator] 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 seventies 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.
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 tour,
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 homogenous-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 fivefold.
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 nineties,
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 our 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've 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 PoolCounter,
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