14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been struggling for the past week or so and, even though there were technical issues as well, a large part of that was because of the influx of traffic mostly related to the World Cup. It turns out that Twitter broke its own record for activity several times this week and, while it was mostly due to the World Cup, the current record came after the final game in the NBA season was won by the LA Lakers.
“It's been an eventful week for World Cup fans around the globe. Many have taken to Twitter in record numbers to tweet about coaching decisions, referee calls and, of course, goals. In this spirit, we thought it would be fun (and instructive) to track the top three most tweeted goals of the tournament so far. These goals had the highest Tweets-per-second (TPS) count in the 30 seconds after a goal was scored,” Twitter said.
The third most popular goal, if you can call it that, was in the Mexico - South Africa match on June 11th and it generated 2,704 tweets per second. Brazil’s first goal against North Korea on June 14th broke that record with 2,928 TPS. But that didn’t last long, as Japan’s goal against Cameroon, also on June 14th, generated a peak of 2,940 TPS.
Things settled down after that, but the record wasn’t to last and, surprisingly, it wasn’t beaten by another football match but by a basketball one. The Lakers’ victory spurred quite a lot of enthusiasm in the Twitter world, with activity reaching 3,085 tweets per second.
Twitter says it sees an average of 750 tweets per second. Of course, with the action heating up in the World Cup, this record and several others will likely be shattered by the time the event is over. That is, if Twitter manages to stay up during this time, as all recent outages don’t paint a pretty picture for the future.