When news of Steve Irwin's sudden and bizarre death broke, it spread rapidly across the internet and around the world.

Web measurement company Hitwise said Australian internet traffic to print news and media websites yesterday hit its highest point since mid-May when the country was transfixed on the rescue of the Beaconsfield miners.

The first signs that this story was choking the internet and chewing up bandwidth came about 2.30pm yesterday. The SMH site and its sister site, theage.com.au, slowed to a crawl as thousands hopped on, trying to see if the rumours were true.

All the while, waves of emails, instant messages, text messages and phone calls would have been fuelling a massive online migration of the curious and the shocked.

Within 30 minutes of the story appearing on smh.com.au site, it hit the No. 1 spot of the day's most viewed stories - the fastest moving story that we can recall.

The BBC site's new live internet monitor reported that traffic was 50-plus per cent above normal activity.

Other key news sites also showed signs of strain and some, including CNN, had to switch to a "lite" mode, ditching bandwidth-hungry elements on the home page in order to cope with the surge in usage.

In Australia, the ABC news site temporarily crashed under the weight of clicks and came back shortly after with a home page that only displayed the one story that everyone wanted to read.

The story quickly climbed to the top of news aggregator Google News, which tracks 45000 news sources from around the world.

It was a leading story on many of the world's leading news websites including CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, CBS, The Guardian in Britain, the Swedish newspaper website Aftonbladet and De Telegraaf in the Netherlands.

It was also the most blogged-about story on the internet. Technorati, which tracks 53 million blogs worldwide, is showing its top three search terms as: "Steve Irwin", "Crocodile Hunter" and "Irwin".

The first search term records more than 25,000 mentions of Irwin, the overwhelming majority of them having been logged in the past 24 hours.

The official Crocodile Hunter website rocketed to number one entertainment personality website yesterday in Australia and number 3 in the US, according to Hitwise. On the previous day it was ranked 36th most popular in Australia and 516th in the US. It also claimed 18.32 per cent of local web traffic within that category.

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