Search volumes described by Google Trends as Volcanic brought Wikipedia and Google Search and News to a halt for up to an hour last night as fans flooded the internet with queries such as "Michael Jackson died" and "Michael Jackson heart attack."

Jackson's wikipedia page had to be taken offline as hundreds of fans bombarded the site with requests to view or update it.

Twitter registered the highest ever percentage of tweets for a specific subject with Jackson based tweets reaching 15% of the global total.

Bing was the slowest search engine to break the story with some people claiming it was hours behind Facebook and Twitter.

Many Google users who searched for news about Michael Jackson's death received an error message which stated

"Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application"

The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site a 4.00am was 48% higher than average.

TMZ the website who initially broke the story also crashed through shear weight of visitors.