In the election which took place Tuesday night, there were an average number of almost 10,000 tweets sent per second around 8.11pm and 9.11pm with a peak of about 15,000 around 8.20pm, according to Twitter.
“Last night, the world tuned in to Twitter to share the election results as U.S. voters chose a president … Throughout the day, people sent more than 31 million election-related Tweets (which contained certain key terms and relevant hashtags).” Twitter representatives said on their blog, early Wednesday.
“And as results rolled in, we tracked the surge in election-related Tweets at 327,452 Tweets per minute (TPM). These numbers reflect the largest election-related Twitter conversation during our 6 years of existence, though they don’t capture the total volume of all Tweets yesterday.”
We can understand why Twitter chose to focus more on the elections tweet in comparison to the rest, as the elections caused the largest surge of tweets in Twitter’s 6 year history.
This was way ahead of other global events that took place recently which people massively tweeted about, like New Year’s Eve (about 6,900 tweets per second), the end of a football match (about 7,100 tweets per second) and Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement (about 8,800 tweets per second).
Twitter say that over time their systems have become more resilient to being ‘over capacity’ as they’ve sought to build their infrastructure. By observation, surges of tweets per second in Kenya are usually in and around football matches (and sporting events) as well, but have also included popular trending topics like #KCSE2012, #AskMartha, #Talk2Raila, or when the country makes global headlines.
