Internet users around the world flooded news sites and social media networks Thursday in an effort to confirm early reports of pop icon Michael Jackson’s death, triggering massive availability issues.

Celebrity news site TMZ.com, which first broke the news of Jackson’s death, was knocked offline after the site was bombarded with traffic, according to reports by Techcrunch.com.

In an effort to resolve the issue, the site’s webmasters disabled search features in account profiles to better handle the spike in the server load.

Source