Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, died very unexpected yesterday and as the sad news spreads around the globe News web sites could not handle the traffic according to Keynote Systems.
Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations said, "Beginning at 5:30pm (EDT), the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds. During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The index returned to normal by 9:15pm (EDT)."
According to Keynote systems beginning during the late afternoon pacific time major news sites, including those of ABC, AOL, LA Times and CBS all started to show marked slowdowns in performance.
While many of the news Web sites are beginning to perform more normally now, many people are just beginning to hear the news of Jackson's death, so it will be interesting to see what the full effect of today's shocking news will have the rest of the night and tomorrow on major news Web sites. Beginning at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time until 8:00 p.m. Eastern, the following sites became nearly unavailable (down to nearly 10% availability): ABC, CBS, LA Times, and AOL according to Keynote.
Via Keynote Systems site.

Update:
Further analysis now shows that a main culprit of these performance and availability issues was third party content and providers' ability to handle the flash crowd of online news readers.
“Our measurement data shows that for sites reported as having performance slowdowns yesterday, internal content delivered quite fast, however content that came from other sources contributed most to the site slowdowns,” said Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems.
Mr. White continued, “For example, ABC.com’s news content was consistently served in a matter of seconds whereas some of the 3rd party content took much longer.”

Michael Jackson died at the age of 50 and actually was set for a comeback tour. More details on CNN.