First, TMZ broke the story of Michael Jackson's death. Then it crashed as readers stormed the site. Then the LA Times posted a report on Jackson, and it crashed.

Twitter had to temporarily disable two features—"Trending Topics" and Search—from user pages to conserve enough juice to keep the system afloat. (See image on TechCrunch of what disappeared.)

Then it was other news sites' turns. ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Gate, and Yahoo! News all slowed down, according to DataCenterKnowledge.com, quoting reports from Keynote Systems, which measures the performance of Web sites. The average time to access some news sites' home pages doubled, Keynote told CNET.

Google told CNET that for about half an hour after Jackson's death, some users had trouble accessing queries on Google News about the singer.

Facebook told the San Jose Mercury News that status updates were running at three times the usual rate in the hour after the news broke.

Venture Beat called the whole experience "a wake up call."

"[N]networks still buckle under the weight of traffic when something like today's events shakes the whole world," Dean Takahashi wrote. "In some ways, the servers worked today. As one site went down, another picked up the torch. But the transitions were rocky.

"As tragic as Michael Jackson's death is, it's only a small taste of what would happen in a true calamity," he concluded, in a post titled, appropriately enough, "Michael Jackson is a test. He is only a test of the emergency broadcast system."

Graph courtesy of Keynote Systems, via DataCenterKnowledge.com