Unless you have spent the last week trekking deep in the Amazon, or crossing the Atlantic in a rowing boat, the media event of the last week has been the death of Michael Jackson.

Almost a week later It still makes every news broadcast, even though there’s no ‘new’ developments, just a desire to rake over the details.

Whatever your view of the man himself, there’s no doubt we’ve lost an awesome singer and performer.

But if you’re a website builder then his death has affected you more than most. Because as news of his death spread across the web, several trusted websites started to crack under the pressure. And when those are the same sites that send traffic to your website, then you start to notice.

As documented by the event chronology over on SEOmoz.org, this was the first story that can truly be said to have been broken online.

The highly niche x17online.com first posted news of Jackson’s collapse at 20.10pm, along with some exclusive photos. It took another 20 minutes for TMZ.com – the site largely credited with breaking the story – to start reporting on the matter. TMZ.com is read by thousands, and has RSS feeds with breaking news to many other sites.

So by 21.22pm the story was being read by many people on TMZ.com and picked up by other websites such as Wikipedia too.

Ever the trusted source of information, it was now that people turned to Google to confirm the story. Such was the volume of people searching for news related to the death of Jackson that Google’s systems assumed it was under attack. This would be exactly the sort of an issue thrown up by an automated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

As a safety measure, Google users were asked to enter a ‘captcha’ code that proved they were real people

And Google News – the service that scours breaking news so that search queries return up-to-the-minute results, broke down entirely. It was a full hour and a half before Google was able to confirm the story with its news feeds.

Google Search results for Michael Jackson from SEOmoz.org

By this time of course TMZ.com itself was offline, as it struggled to deal with the volume of traffic. And even the websites of massive news organisations such as CNN.com and MSNBC.com were slowed under the weight of visitors.

Google told Web User that it had seen “volcanic levels” of activity between 2030-2315BST.

They added that searches for ‘Michael Jackson’ made up more than 50 of the top 100 searches.

OK, it’s unlikely you noticed any change in the traffic that Google was sending your website. But this may go down in history as another GoogleFail – that when people turned to Google when they needed it most, it didn’t work.

If you’re a keen user of Google, Gmail or YouTube you may have noticed a black hole last week. What Google are describing as a network ‘traffic jam’ caused all services to go down for the best part of an hour.

Google described the error as ‘embarrassing’. If I was making $1m a minute from my website, I’d call it a few other things too.

A systems error meant all data services got routed through Asia, which created a virtual traffic jam of information.

A senior VP for Google described it like this “Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48am Pacific time [3:48pm UK time].”

Google also said that they would work diligently to avoid future downtime. Once again, I could come up with other adjectives.

Lots of users flocked to Twitter to make as much as possible of the big ‘G’s fallibility. “Googlefail” rapidly became the most discussed topic.

Did you notice the failure? Do you depend on Google services? Should companies be held accountable to this kind of outage? Leave us a comment below.