Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Check out this Twitter spike around the time that Michael Jackson died courtesy of our internal Spinn3r stats:

Apparently, I’m not the only person who noticed this:

As the news of Michael Jackson’s fate unfolded, sites around the Web felt the strain of spiking interest.

On Twitter, the volume of Jackson-related messages – up to 5,000 per minute at peak – put such a demand on the site that it slowed considerably.

“We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in an e-mail response to our inquiry. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.”