As everyone knows, Michael Jackson died of a heart attack today. But you might not know that he nearly crashed Twitter posthumously. Mashable estimates that over 30% of tweets this afternoon were comments on Jackson’s death. Many people (like me) actually heard the news first via Twitter—founder Biz Stone told the New York Times Bits blog, “We saw more than double the normal tweets per second the moment the news broke—the biggest increase since the US presidential election.”

As often happens during notable events, Twitter was visibly struggling under the heavy load of tweets this afternoon and evening, with slow load times. Twitter has become a tangible way to measure how much a news story is affecting people around the world—the conversation surrounding Jackson’s death just goes to show how monumental the news felt for so many people.

—Alyssa