Comments on: Current events and traffic spikes

By: brion

brion — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:16:09 +0000

Giants27 :

What’s causing the error message this time?

That doesn’t appear to be MJ-related. Primary database fell down and needed to be switched out: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/downtime-on-en-wikipedia-org-resolved/

Giants27 — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:31:48 +0000

What’s causing the error message this time?

domas — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:45:23 +0000

I posted somewhat more verbose tech explanation at http://dammit.lt/2009/06/26/embarrassment/ in case anyone wonders :)

Anthere — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:43:50 +0000

When I got the error several times and learned about the death from a friend, I immediately joked “The site is dying because of Michael Jackson”.

Jeee, it was actually true !

George William Herbert — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:06:07 +0000

Here at $midsizedsmartphoneco, the web traffic did the same thing right as the news went out, as did SMS traffic.

Not much of the load went towards Wikipedia, but it was a pretty widespread effect across many sites.

Nick Moreau — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:01:40 +0000

re: jps

Remember, Michael Jackson is on the front page of Wikipedia, whereas Farrah isn’t. That partially helps with the traffic boost.

J.delanoy — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:12:57 +0000

Yeah, he was -that- great :-)

David Gerard — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:03:57 +0000

Yeah, I got “server couldn’t connect to database” a few times when I looked at Talk:Michael Jackson. He knocked Wikipedia off air momentarily!

jps — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:46:02 +0000

So based on those two spikes, Fawcett was 1/3rd as popular as Jackson?