Twitter was overrun with hashtags and drunk punditry as the returns form presidential election came in last night. We were there, and so was pretty much all of America. Or you'd think so when you look at the freaking numbers. Reuters reports that democracy-loving tweeters fired off some 31 million election related messages last night.
The deluge of tweets made the even "the most tweeted about event in US political history." The previous record (10 million tweets) was set during the first presidential debate on October 3rd.
The 140 character frenzy escalated to a maximum frequency of 327,000 tweets per minute at about 11:15 when the networks were about to call the election for Barack Obama. That's a lot of Twittering! Are your fingers tired America? You've got four whole years to recover. [Reuters]
Update
Twitter's engineers posted official numbers breaking down that 327,000 tweets per minute peak.
As an engineering team, we keep an eye on all of the activity across the platform –– in particular, on the number of Tweets per second (TPS). Last night, Twitter averaged about 9,965 TPS from 8:11pm to 9:11pm PT, with a one-second peak of 15,107 TPS at 8:20pm PT and a one-minute peak of 874,560 TPM. Seeing a sustained peak over the course of an entire event is a change from the way people have previously turned to Twitter during live events.
That's some good tweetin' America! [Twitter]