Michael Jackson death slows web

The news of Michael Jackson's death saw major websites such as Google and Twitter struggle to deal with volumes of traffic.

TMZ.com, the celebrity gossip site that broke the news, also went offline for a period of time, according to reports.

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The volume of people searching for news relating to the singer, who died after suffering a cardiac arrest, led Google to believe that it was under attack.

People searching the web through Google were asked to enter a 'captcha' code to prove that Google was not being hit by an automated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Google told Web User that it had seen "volcanic levels" of activity between 1430 and 1515 Pacific time (2230-2315BST).

A spokesman told Web User "Michael Jackson dominated searches yesterday in the US, with more than 50 of the top 100 searches related to the deceased pop star."

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Other news services such as CNN and MSNBC also struggled to cope with the volumes of traffic, according to web-monitoring firm Keynote Systems.