16,000 Tweets Per Second Crashes Twitter At New Years

Twitter had a spectacular 2011 and that continued right up until the very last hour of the year as the site came under pressure with a stunning 16,150 tweets per second. The site starting facing trouble around 3PM GMT which was just as the new year was being celebrated in Japan which is a major market for the social network. Users were no longer able to post messages as the service more or less ground to a halt.

The most interesting way of analyzing Twitter’s growth is that at the same time last year Twitter came under pressure with 6366 tweets per second on New Year’s Eve so you can pretty much say that the entire service is 2.5 times bigger this year. Other previous milestones for tweets per second include the Women’s world cup final, Beyonce announcing her pregnancy and the earthquakes in Japan.

Anybody who had any doubt that Twitter was here for the long run only has to look at these numbers. It is hard to even wrap your head around 16,000 tweets and to think that was happening every single second just shows the scaling issues Twitter face on a daily basis. It will be interesting to see what the next big record is, probably some sort of major news event over the coming months but as the year goes on you would probably bet on the Olympics, The US Presidential election or even New Year’s Eve 2012.