The disappearance of Queen Elizabeth II has shaken the entire Web, with abundant traffic on Wikipedia and a few outages all over the world on Twitter.
The death of Elizabeth II, which occurred on Thursday, September 8, has shocked people around the world in recent hours. His disappearance, massively relayed and followed on television, has its share of consequences on the Web. The pages linked to the sovereign and to England were indeed stormed on Wikipedia while Twitter experienced a few hiccups Thursday on the sidelines of the official announcement of the death.
Wikipedia: Royal visits
Tell me more about your traffic and I’ll tell you what’s up. We could almost sum things up like this, with Wikipedia. The universal encyclopedia is in fact always in high demand whenever a major event, whatever its nature, occurs on the globe. And this is obviously the case since yesterday.
As confirmed by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, administrator of the Wikimedia France association, Internet users have browsed by the millions on the pages dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II. Whether in the United Kingdom and therefore in English, or in Spanish, French, Italian or Russian, the number of page views has reached peaks, reaching 23.7 million requests per minute at its peak. of the phenomenon, around 6 p.m. Thursday. The “calm” only returned around 11 p.m., midnight, when generally, the platform does not exceed the bar of 10 million requests / minute.
The event is reminiscent of the influx experienced by Wikipedia in 2009, when the death of star Michael Jackson, who at the time had put the encyclopedia on the ground. ” Today, tech is more reliable and can handle this kind of massive influx of visitors. “, reassures Pierre-Yves Beaudouin on Twitter.
Twitter collapses under the emotion
Here, Twitter, let’s talk about it! Because unlike Wikipedia, the servers of the little blue bird social network did not hold up. Between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m., thousands of users made reports via the platform Downdetectorall over the world: in France, but also in the United States, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and elsewhere.
The breakdown occurred around the time of the disappearance of Elizabeth II, announced by the royal family at 7:30 p.m. Since Thursday evening, everything has been back to normal and the number of reports has returned to its usual level.
What is certain is that the death of the woman who reigned over the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth for more than 70 years has not left the world indifferent, far beyond its borders and its subjects.
Sources: Vice, Numerama, Downdetector
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