Last week we witnessed a unprecedented Internet event. The sudden death of Michael Jackson (MJ) literally took down several news and social networking  sites for a short time.

This overload, and ultimately the failure, was preceded by another newsworthy event. The world was still entranced by the events unfolding in Iran and the results of its election. It became quite public that Twitter had become the most up-to-date source of news, beating out major news networks. News giants were still reeling from the knockout punch of being days behind in their reporting. And just as the pieces of this new landscape puzzle were being put together, the MJ news hit. Of course, it should be noted that the Iranian government was censoring outgoing news and it was impossible to tell if the news being tweeted was legitimate.

Like many, I immediately went to Twitter for information when I heard the Michael Jackson news. For the first time ever, I was presented with the Twitter “fail whale” screen. A message at the top of the page read “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” Facebook reported triple the number of status updates in the hour after the MJ news emerged according the the LA Times. One source reports that both Google and Yahoo! both initially thought they were experiencing a cyber attack! Another source stated “Between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, the availability for the news sites from ABC, CBS, the LA Times and CNN Money dropped to almost 10%, meaning that about nine out of 10 visitors couldn’t get the sites to load.” Google’s official blog shows a queries spike that has to been seen to be believed.

So, what does this mean? Is the Internet a house of cards ready to tumble? How can sites hope to cope with the ever increasing user-base? Will the Internet reach critical mass?

It’s difficult to say. World-wide Internet growth has slowed a bit, but this could also be due to the poor economy. As days pass, mobile tech becomes more accessible, so we could see an increase in usage. Social networking sites are multiplying like rabbits. Assuming bandwidth isn’t the issue, all site owners can do is add more servers or switch to a host with a more robust hosting environment. Cloud computing may also soon help out as virtual cloud PCs become a reality.

For now we will all just have to wait and see…