The world’s leading search engine Google thought it was coming under attack from an automated virus Thursday to a flood of searches for Michael Jackson on Google’s news page.
Google said that millions and millions of users searched for Michael Jackson as news of his death spread that the site rated the searches as “volcanic;” rating the millions of searches as akin to what an automated virus attack would look like.
Due the preemptive measures Google then took, millions of people received a “We’re sorry” page where they had to enter a verification code before the news page came up.
“The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a ‘We’re sorry’ page before finding the articles they were looking for,” Google said in a released statement.
Google was not the only news site swarmed with hits. Yahoo stated that its front pages news story titled “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was its most clicked story ever with over 800,000 hits in 10 minutes. Yahoo News attracted a record 16.4 million visitors, topping the 15.1 million on the day Barack Obama was elected U.S. president in November.
