World Cup Cuts Through Previous Twitter Record

I live in downtown Toronto, which, when last I researched the matter, is statistically the most ethnically diverse city in the world. As such, the World Cup is a pedestrian’s nightmare – with no general squad bias, the entire duration of the tournament is a storm of rabid fans cheering and criss-crossing sidewalks and spilling out of pubs and driving their World-Cup-themed automocars down the street, honking all the while; World Cup Toronto is a sight that needs to be seen to be believed. You should come next time. No, you can’t sleep on my couch. Anyhow, the point is that the World Cup creates in human beings a sense of frenzy like no other event on planet Earth. So it’s no surprise that the 2010 tournament has now shattered Twitter’s previous tweets-per-second record. After Thursday’s Japan-Denmark match (Japan, 3-1), the service exploded at a rate of 3283 tweets per second, shaming the previous record of 3085tps, set only a week ago during the NBA championships. To put this into perspective, Twitter averages about 750tps at any given moment. “We continued to see big spikes in Tweets following goals in the World Cup,” said Twitter of the record, and the resulting Fail Whales. I guess this really is the most unsurprising news you’ll hear today. Nothing synchronizes the world like the Beautiful Game.