A Tsunami Called Michael Jackson

A tsunami has many similarities to what it was like when Michael Jackson left our world on June 25, 2009. First the ocean is calm and the waves recede, much like information about his concert tour came in small waves as reported on this blog.  Similarly, a tsunami offers very few warning signs to the untrained eye. A few fish flop around on the shore as the tide recedes and many become curious and explore the waterless shore.  Then suddenly a huge wall of water a few miles a way approaches and shortly thereafter all hell breaks loose!

A strange thing happened to SongChannels.com June 25, 2009. I had received my first website monitoring alert at 10:45 a.m. that SongChannels.com was only available at a 50% rate.  This meant just 2 hours prior to Michael Jackson passing my SongChannels site had server problems, the first recorded since I obtained a server monitoring service a few weeks prior.

The server problem turned out to be a long series of technical issues I encountered all day outside the Internet.  Prior to my learning of Michael Jackson’s passing, I deemed it a particularly “bad day” full of never ending problems.  The way I heard about Michael Jackson dying was strange too. Alex Jones, at Infowars.com during his Internet program, had just announced the passing of Farrah Fawcet. Shortly after, I heard Alex say something about Michael Jackson dying and I couldn’t believe it! Say what? What??? Everyone else knows what followed, a huge tidal wave of fans expressing themselves from all over the world that caused Google to think it was under attack.

This chart shows a small yellow patch above the date denoting June 25th just 2 hours
prior to when Michael Jackson’ purportedly died.

What I find strangest of all is, in spite of the huge amount of traffic generated by the news of Michael Jackson’s passing, my site hasn’t had any server issues whatsoever.  My SongChannels site gave a virtual warning of something huge about to happen, like the waves prior to a tidal wave receding from the shore.  My server was at 50% capacity for a few minutes and then, boom, the news wave hit in a matter of a couple hours thereafter.  Welcome to the twilight zone.