Interest
New Year's Day in Japan Brings Twitter to Standstill
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
Japanese Twitter users sent approximately 16,197 tweets per second at midnight on New Year's Eve to celebrate the arrival of 2012 in Japan, causing many to receive the error message that Twitter was over capacity and eventually leading to the site going down for maintenance. The tweets per second average, however, did not beat the record set on December 9 during a re-airing of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's 1986 anime film Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
On December 9, Japanese Twitter users set a world record of 25,088 tweets per second during the film. At the moment that the main characters Pazu and Sheeta say the spell word "balse" at the climax of the film, fans across Japan used social websites to say the spell together with the two characters.
When a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit near Torishima Island more than 300 miles south of Tokyo on New Year's Day at 2:28 p.m. local time, it set off a new wave of Twitter posts in Japan.
Sources: The Daily Telegraph, The Japan Times, Gigazine
