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Michael Jackson’s funeral was the most watched daytime program in history and quite probably the most watched program ever worldwide.  The service, held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, was broadcast all across the globe, and for those who couldn’t get to a TV, it was streamed live on the net.  Unlike the day the news of his death broke, the net was not brought to his knees.

Although there were reports of slowdowns and a few scattered outages, for the most part the net was able to shoulder the burden.  CNN reported 11 million unique visitors, 72 million page views and over 750,000 concurrent streams of the funeral.  Twitter suffered yet another outage as users were unable to view or post tweets for a brief time.  Many Facebook users complained of slowdowns and random errors, most attributed to CNN’s use of Facebook Connect.  The service reported that as Jackson’s funeral got underway, 300,000 users were logged in and posting roughly 6,000 status updates a minute.  The pop icon’s Facebook fan page now has nearly 7 million fans,which is a good million more than President Obama’s.

Don’t expect traffic to return quite to normal just yet.  With the cause of Jackson’s sudden death still unknown, possible criminal charges pending against his doctors, and a custody fight for his children shaping up, the hunger for all things Michael isn’t likely to ebb anytime soon.

Read [News.com.au]