By Pras Rajagopalan, CBCNews.ca. So it appears all the breathless huffing and puffing about how Michael Jackson's memorial service Tuesday afternoon would "break the internet" was rather overblown.

While the memorial was a massive online event, the Keynote Business 40 Web Performance Index told CBCNews.ca in an email that "the Internet, as a whole, appeared unaffected by the large amount of online traffic generated by the more than one million online viewers of Michael Jacksons memorial service [Tuesday] afternoon."

Keynote noted that of the sites on its index, including those belonging to the New York Times, Yahoo! News and CNN, web pages took on average 20 per cent longer to load fully. Average load time increased to 5.5 seconds from 4.25 seconds.

Some sites took as long as 18 seconds to load.

During the January inauguration of Barack Obama, in contrast, those sites on the index were on average 60 per cent slower.

Meanwhile, Akamai technologies, a Massachusetts-based company that provides video streaming capabilities to a number of prominent media companies, reported "the second largest day ever in terms of total traffic on the Akamai network." According to Akamai's index of news sites, the Jackson memorial had 3,924,370 online visitors per minute at its peak.

But again, those numbers paled in comparison to the online activity generated by Obama's inauguration, when peak traffic was recorded at 5,401,250 visitors per minute.

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