It's said that the Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. Maybe, but it barely survived the death of Michael Jackson.

A series of web sites fell like dominoes as Boomers and GenXers raced to verify the truth of the Jackson death rumors yesterday. Twitter, Wikipedia, tmz.com, latimes.com, and Google News all reported outages, according to CNN -- which had problems itself with cnn.com.

Reportedly, 30 percent of Tweets were related to Jackson, and there was so much traffic that Iranian protesters couldn't get to Twitter to update their news.

Even as of Friday noon EDT, 6 of the top 10 Twitter trending topics were related to Jackson.