Super Bowl breaks Twitter records

Technically the New York Giants won the big game over the weekend, but Twitter was kind of a winner as well.

Instead of the old days when you just got drunk at a bar and screamed to your fellow patrons in sorrow or celebration, now we’re screaming to the rest of the world. And last night, it was at a rate of 10,000 tweets per second.

That was the average during the final three minutes of the nail-biting, down-to-the-finish-line match between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots.

The peak was right when the Giants scored what would be their game-winning touchdown. During the 60 seconds surrounding that momentous feat, nearly 734,000 tweets (or 12,233 every second) were posted.

This captured the record for the highest number of tweets sent during a sporting event. The all-time record probably doesn’t even register to the majority of Americans. It was two months ago, when the Japanese animated film Castle in the Sky was broadcast on TV.

For some reason, that triggered 25,088 tweets to be sent per second. For the Super Bowl, there was a notable trend among commercials that encouraged users to tweet corporate hashtags during the game. It was the biggest Super Bowl for Twitter by a long shot.