Jan 7, 2011 13:36 GMT  ·  By

More and more people use Twitter and certain times of the year or special events naturally lead to a lot of activity on the site. The New Year, as you would expect, is no exception and a lot of people took to Twitter to spread their wishes for 2011. So many people, in fact, that they shattered any previous usage records Twitter ever saw.

"Well, that didn’t take long. Just four seconds after midnight in Japan on January 1st, Twitterers set an all-time record in the number of Tweets sent per second (TPS)," Tiwtter announced.

"At that moment, the world sent a staggering 6,939 TPS wishing friends and followers a fond 'Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu' ('Happy New Year!')," it said.

"People make it a point to call their friends and connect with everyone they know to celebrate. With a population of over 127 million, Japanese mobile networks have been known to crash under the strain of this collective cheer," Twitter explained.

To put things in perspective, the previous usage record was less than half of what Japan achieved on New Year's. Interestingly enough, the previous record was also linked to Japan.

During the 2010 World Cup match between Japan and Denmark, which Japan won, 3,283 tweets were sent per second. There were other periods of high usage during the World Cup, but this particular match topped them.

On New Year's though, Japan smashed it, with close to 7,000 tweets every second. In fact, Twitter says, that record was broken a total of 68 times in a three-minute period as usage fluctuated.

Though Japan users were the most enthusiastic, there were plenty of people cheering on Twitter all over the world. For example, when the US East Coast time zone entered the new year, there were as many as 3,000 tweets per second. Twitter put together a video with the activity on New Year's around the world.