BANGALORE, INDIA: The 'volcanic' eruption of search for news about the death of pop icon Michael Jackson, had a meltdown impact on the Internet.

As millions of fans round the world went on searching news pertaining to the legendary pop star on Web, following his sudden death, even the search giant Google found it bit difficult to withstand the pressure and crashed under the pressure for a while.

The moment US celebrity site www.tmz.com broke the news, there was a volcanic eruption in the Internet search, which resulted in Google getting interrupted for a while.

A Google representative confirmed that "between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson."

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia also reportedly succumbed to the search pressure. If this was the condition of the search giant, the impact on on Twitter is up to the guess of everybody.

There were more than 66,500 tweets within an hour of the first reports that the star had been rushed to hospital. And soon the microblogging site also reportedly collapsed for a while. LA Times website, which was the first to officially confirm the report of Jackson's death, also went down soon, said a report.

According to a review by Keynote Systems, a company that tracks site performance, the availability of more than 30 online news services fell from 100 per cent to 86 per cent, said a Cnet report.

The average time it took to access the home pages of top media sites jumped from 4.2 seconds to 8.9 seconds. Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, said that among the sites who saw the biggest drop offs in performance were ABCNews.com, Latimes.com and CBSnews.com.

Yes, dead Jackson is even more powerful than the living one.