Twitter may have broke the story, but the increase in search traffic at Google Thursday was first seen as a malware attack Google admitted.
The Google News site had to shut down briefly leaving a message that read: “We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”
Yahoo saw a record number of unique visitors for a day with 16.4 million visitors. It was also their single most visited story in their history.