SYDNEY, Australia (Reuters) -- In death as in life, iconic TV naturalist Steve Irwin captivated
millions worldwide and clogged the Internet as fans from Guam to Glasgow reacted with
disbelief to news "The Crocodile Hunter" was dead.
Some Web sites groaned to a halt within hours of the first reports Monday that Irwin had been
killed by a stingray's barb through his chest in a freak diving accident off Australia's northeast
coast.
Web measurement company Hitwise said Irwin's death was the biggest news event read by
Australians on the Internet since two Australian miners were trapped by a mine collapse in
southern Tasmania state in late April.
"We noticed that the Web site www.crocodilehunter.com increased in popularity quite
substantially. It became the number one entertainment personality Web site in Australia
yesterday and in the United States it also became the third most popular," Hitwise Asia-Pacific
marketing director James Borg told Reuters.
Australian news Web sites struggled to keep up with demand.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp.'s site (www.abc.com.au) had to temporarily shut down,
posting a notice Monday that it was experiencing higher than normal traffic.
It resumed soon after in a low-bandwidth format to cope with hundreds of thousands of hits.
Newspaper Web sites also wobbled but kept up with demand.
A spokesman for The Sydney Morning Herald's site, www.smh.com.au, said it had
experienced a "huge" 40 percent spike in page impressions compared with the previous
week's average weekday number of about 500,000.
There was also a 70 percent jump in visitors to its pages, the spokesman said.
That pattern was mirrored around the world, with Irwin's death leading major news Web sites
such as CNN.com and U.S. and British newspaper Web sites, as well as swamping their most
viewed and most emailed categories.
Web logs and Internet feedback pages were also awash with postings from shocked readers
from around the world, many of them from Americans charmed by Irwin's quirky style and his
typically Australian catchphrase of "crikey."
Irwin first found fame in the United States before his "Crocodile Hunter" documentaries on U.S.-
based television company Discovery Communications' Animal Planet attracted a global
audience of 200 million -- 10 times Australia's population.
"Crikey!, I miss him so much," Tina Treece from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, posted on
CNN.com's feedback page CNN Exchange.
The site had contributions from readers in Guam, Romania, Thailand, France, Scotland, India,
New Zealand, Canada, Brunei, Britain, Malaysia, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Many faced the problem of explaining to their children how one of their favorite TV characters
had died.
"Why did it have to be Steve Irwin?" 11-year-old Daniel told Australian Associated Press.