Brands including Marks & Spencer have asked for their advertising to be removed from the Daily Mail website page featuring a controversial column about the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately.
After a storm of protest which grew during the day online, Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir defended her comment piece, rejecting accusations that it was homophobic.
In a highly unusual move, the Daily Mail issued a statement from Moir late today in which she hit out the internet protests that led to 800 complaints being made to the Press Complaints Commission today, causing the regulator's website to crash for most of the afternoon.
Display advertising has been removed from the Mail Online webpage around Moir's article. Earlier today a Facebook page was set up urging users to lobby brands featured on the page, including Marks & Spencer, to pull their advertising.
"Marks & Spencer does not tolerate any form of discrimination," said a spokesman for the retailer. "We have asked the Daily Mail to move our advertisement away from the article. This is a matter for The Daily Mail."
Celebrities Stephen Fry and Derren Brown were among those who used their Twitter feeds to urge followers to make complaints.
"Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention," Moir said.
She went on to defend the text of her article, which argued that Gately's death "strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships".
"When I wrote that 'he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine', I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality," she said.
"In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones," Moir added.
Stephen Abell, the PCC deputy director, said the regulator had received 800 complaints today via phone and the internet in a couple of hours about the Moir piece, which has provoked a storm of criticism on Twitter and other social networks such as Facebook over what internet users saw as the Daily Mail writer's insinuation that Gately's death in a Mallorca hotel room last weekend was connected in some unspecified way to the fact that he was gay.
However, the PCC will only launch a formal investigation into Moir's article if it receives a formal complaint from Gately's family, who are preparing for the former Boyzone singer's funeral in Dublin tomorrow. "We made ourselves available to the family after the death," Abell said.
The PCC's homepage was back online by about 4.30pm, although it was loading slowly. "It has been a bit of a flurry today," Abell added.
Brown, who has about 124,000 Twitter followers, posted a direct link to the PCC online complaints page at about midday today. RT @nikkib @DerrenBrown No use just being cross. Complain where it matters. She breaches 1,3,5 & 12 of the code
http://ow.ly/uL56
Fry, who has more than 800,000 Twitter followers, re-tweeted this link. "Disgusted with Daily Mail's Jan Moir? Complain where it matters. She breaches 1,3,5 & 12 of the code
http://ow.ly/uL56 " (via @kenrayner)
