Recently, something remarkable happened on Twitter: On Saturday, August 3 in Japan, people watched an airing of Castle in the Sky, and at one moment they took to Twitter so much that we hit a one-second peak of 143,199 Tweets per second. (August 2 at 7:21:50 PDT; August 3 at 11:21:50 JST)
To give you some context of how that compares to typical numbers, we normally take in more than 500 million Tweets a day which means about 5,700 Tweets a second, on average. This particular spike was around 25 times greater than our steady state.
During this spike, our users didn’t experience a blip on Twitter. That’s one of our goals: to make sure Twitter is always available no matter what is happening around the world.
From a developers point of view I just find it impressive that during one second they processed 143,199 tweets along with all the other refresh's and requests without a single blip being noticed. Hat's off to the Twitter team.
Read the full blog post here