Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres managed to set a retweet record with her star-studded selfie that caused a Twitter outage that lasted well over 20 minutes.
The selfie featured Hollywood stars Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. However, the outage it caused seemed to have made Ellen a worldwide celebrity within minutes as she trended.
At the time of filing this story, the tweet had been retweeted 2.17 million times and favourited 1.04 million times, even breaking a record set by President Barack Obama’s tweet with his picture hugging First Lady Michelle Obama after his re-election in 2012. That tweet had got merely 780,579 retweets.
The sudden traffic upsurge due to retweeting crashed the micro-blogging site for over 20 minutes. Such a major outage due to one tweet is unprecedented although major events are known to have slowed down or halted the site in the past.
In fact, Twitter had to confirm the same on its status page. Ellen DeGeneres herself shared the news of the Twitter outage in the midst of the Oscar ceremony.
One of the major incidents of the social network crashing because of increased user activity was reported on 21 January 2013, the Inauguration Day that marked the beginning of the second term of Barack Obama as US President. Twitter’s @gov handle had posted that 1.1million Inauguration-related tweets were posted during the ceremony, compared to 82,000 tweets during Obama’s first inauguration day.
Interestingly, Twitter had moved to its own data centers in 2011 after which instances of service outages or “fail whale” due to server load reduced considerably.
