The verdict in the State of Florida vs. Casey Anthony murder trial coincided with a spike in online news traffic.
Content delivery network Akamai tells us that it saw a spike in its Net Usage Index for News around the time of the verdict. As the verdict was announced, news site pageviews jumped from about 2 million to nearly 3.3 million a minute -- nearly all of that coming from the U.S.
CNN saw an online traffic spike as well. The network tells us that more than 1 million users were watching CNN.com/live between 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. This was 30 times higher than the prior four-week average.
CNN.com (which syndicates Mashable content) also experienced a surge in regular web traffic, with 12 million pageviews -- four times the four-week average -- on the site during the hour the verdict was announced.
Twenty-five-year-old Anthony was found not guilty of the murder of her 2-year-old daughter. Anthony's trial lasted nearly six weeks, but the case itself has been a big part of cable news for the past three years.