In a testament to how much people around the world loved Michael Jackson, the preliminary numbers released for his memorial service are astounding. In what is being described as the biggest online even ever, Akamai delivered more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams in both the Flash and Windows Media formats.
From Giga Om:
There were 3,924,370 visitors per minute as of 1 pm EST and an average of more than 3.3 million visitors per minute overall. That is second only to the 4,247,971 global visitors per minute who visited news sites on June 25th when the news of Michael Jackson first hit the web. Unlike June 25th, there weren’t many outages reported, but there were widespread slowdowns. According to Gomez, a company that monitors the web, the availability of the home pages of seven of the mainstream news media sites from 12:45 pm-3 pm EST only dipped as low as 98.2 percent even though the response time was slower than usual. Response time (page load times) ranged from 6.5 seconds to 18.5 seconds (usually spans 3.5-7.3 seconds), according to Gomez. However, when it comes to live streaming, Gomez saw lots of rebuffering (i.e.. video ‘stalling issues’) at these news sites — time spent waiting rather than watching was under 5 percent in the U.S. but as high as 40 percent in Asia.
For other stories I have read, the memorial service was second to only one other event in the hostory of the internet……..The inauguration of Barak Obama.
[Giga Om]
That shit shut my internet down a few times…I was none too pleased. I thought I forgot to pay my cable bill or something.