The death of Michael Jackson became the biggest story yet to hit the internet, as leading websites struggled to cope with a deluge of traffic from people wanting to find out the latest news.

It was a day that showed both the power and frailty of the medium. A celebrity news site, TMZ.com, secured the scoop of a lifetime when it was first to report that Jackson had died — but the site then crashed several times, unable to cope with millions of visitors flooding to it.

Other websites did not fare much better. Google believed it was under attack when the news first broke. For 35 minutes, millions of people who googled Jackson’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. Google said that there had been a “volcanic” surge in interest in Michael Jackson, with most of the top 100 searches related to the singer.

All Facebook, which tracks Facebook usage, reported that Jackson’s page was attracting about 20 fans a second, and fast becoming one of the top pages in all of Facebook.

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Perez Hilton’s gossip blog also broke down under the weight of people rushing to the site, and the micro-blogging service Twitter shut down temporarily after receiving hundreds of thousands of tweets. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the US presidential election,” Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, said.

Internet analysts said that, at its peak, roughly 15 per cent of all posts on Twitter mentioned Michael Jackson. That compares with less than 5 per cent for Iran’s disputed elections and the swine flu pandemic. Celebrities such as Demi Moore and P Diddy used Twitter to offer their personal tributes, but the Foreign Office denied that David Miliband was among those to do the same. A tweet reading “Never has one soared so high yet dived so low” was attributed to the Foreign Secretary, but his office said that the account was a fake.

Blogs and social media sites have grown in influence and importance in the decade since the news aggregation site Drudge Report broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and, while Thursday’s events were partly a tale of the traditional news media playing catch-up with the internet, they also showed how the established players have finally worked out how to tap into the power of the web. TMZ.com is owned by the internet giant AOL, itself an arm of Time Warner, the multibillion-dollar media conglomerate that runs the TV news channel CNN.

Traditional news outlets such as the BBC and Sky News were cautious in following TMZ.com, but told audiences that the website had a history of correctly reporting such stories — it was the first to reveal that the actor Heath Ledger had died.

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