On Saturday, August 3, in Japan, people watched an airing of Castle in the Sky, a 1986 animated feature film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. They were not merely watching the movie, they were also tweeting about the movie. So much so, that Twitter hit a one-second peak of 143,199 tweets per second. 

The microblogging site normally takes in over 500 million Tweets a day, which translates to about 5,700 Tweets a second, on average. This particular spike was around 25 times greater than our steady state, says Twitter.

Twitter users are familiar with the company’s fail whale, the graphic of a whale held up by a flock of birds, illustrated by artist Yiying Lu. It appears every time Twitter is over-capacity or down. Over the months, the number of times the whale reared its head, has come down dramatically.

Raffi Krikorian, VP of Platform Engineering, explains some of the changes Twitter has made under the hood to make this possible. It makes interesting reading, and here is the link.  

[Image courtesy: Twitter]