Twitter is undoubtedly the most popular way to exchange and discuss news topics nowadays. Be it politics, pop culture or even severe weather, if something has happened, chances are someone you’re following is going to Tweet about it.

The past week has been coincidentally filled with the heartbreaking celebrity deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. As you can imagine, Twitter buckled under the pressures of the Tweeting frenzy, especially this past Thursday with the death of Farrah Fawcett followed by that of Michael Jackson. Twitter even had to disable its Search feature in order to maintain Tweet functionality.

It really makes you wonder – what would happen if there was a national disaster? What if Twitter had been around on 9/11 for the WTC catastrophe or the London Metro attacks? Would Twitter have survived?

And it’s not only Twitter. Many news sites and celebrity blogs were down following the announcement of Michael Jackson’s death. Are the Web sites we’ve come to depend on to provide us with up-to-the-minute news updates going to be there when we need them most?

For more information on how Twitter handled the event, visit: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/25/its-kill-feature-time-again-at-twitter-to-stay-up/

For more information on how the entire Web was affected, visit: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/25/the-web-collapses-under-the-weight-of-michael-jacksons-death/

Crystal Archbell, Program Manager

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.