Social Storm - Breaking News and the Saturation of the Internet

Michael Jackson's tragic death this past week created an unprecedented wave of traffic on the Internet that temporarily overloaded many sites and services. As CNN noted, the advent of social media has dramatically increased the amplifying effect of big news stories. Several years ago, news stories reported reactions from the blogosphere as the voice of ordinary people. Today, ordinary people all over the world can communicate to many people in real time using services like Facebook and Twitter. It seems as though overnight our collective ability to generate traffic on the Internet has spiked far beyond the capacity of current systems to deal with peak load in the face of dramatic events like Jackson's death.

More significantly, we are only just seeing the very beginning of the bandwidth-gobbling revolution known as social media. As AT & T is fast learning in the US market, mobile Internet usage will skyrocket as handsets and services become more sophisiticated and mobile bandwidth grows. Internet engineering experts have been predicting the saturation of the Internet for several years; it appears that we have now arrived at the saturation point during peak usage. How long will it be before Internet brownouts become a common occurence? The answer may depend on when the global economy recovers from its current doldrums.