Last night around 7pm I started to get a flurry of emails from FlashReport readers — they couldn’t get onto the website! I tried it out myself and, sure enough, it was slow as molasses. I quickly reached out to our ace team of programmers at Cloudspace (they are located in Orlando, Florida so it was a bit later there) — and they got on it right away.
Their first report to me was that the site had ground to a virtual standstill because of a massive volume of traffic coming to the site. I thought this to be a little odd, for a Thursday night.
Soon after that first report, the answer came back. It turns out that in a commentary I wrote for FR a couple of weeks ago I had a graphic image of the cover of Michael Jackson’s 1984 "Thriller" album — and for some reason, when one did a Google images search for this, the image on my site came up number two! Anyways, as folks around the web sought out that particular graphic they would start to link from their websites and emails to that file. This then led to others grabbing the link and so on and so on. The exponential effort led to a site overload.
The problem has been fixed on the site, but I never would have guessed that internet traffic following the sudden death of the pop superstar at the young age of 50 would have shut down the FlashReport!
P.S. I am avoiding putting any graphics of Michael Jackson in this post on purpose