Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) went down on Sunday after Ellen DeGeneres’ self-portrait taken during Hollywood’s 86th annual Academy Awards became the most shared image ever on the website in less than two hours. The “selfie” included other Hollywood stars including Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, Julia Roberts, and the Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o. Bradley Cooper snapped the photo.
Twitter officially confirms the outage
DeGeneres shared the “selfie” through her Twitter feed. In less than two hours, it had been shared by more than two million users, and so far 2.683 million users have shared it by retweeting. Shortly after, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) website began to experience technical issues, and @TheAcademy had to apologize. Twitter had to officially confirm it on the company’s status page. Ellen DeGeneres said, “We got an email from Twitter and we crashed and broke Twitter. We have made history.” After Cooper snapped the image, actress Meryl Streep said that she had never tweeted before.
DeGeneres’ photo has broken the record set by President Barack Obama. The U.S. President Obama’s re-election victory snap “Four More Years“, which showed Obama hugging the first lady, was retweeted about 780,000 times during the election night in 2012. Other popular Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) photos from the Sunday’s event included Ellen DeGeneres selfie with Liza Minnelli, taken immediately after the host’s comment on the appearance of the Broadway star.
Twitter was down for more than 20 minutes
The sudden upsurge in traffic kept the microblogging site down for at least 20 minutes. Such a big outage due to just one tweet has never been seen before, though major events in the past have sometimes slowed down Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) in the past. Before the Oscars event, the social networking site crashed due to heavy user activity on January 21, 2013. That marked the beginning of the second term of President Barack Obama. During the inauguration day ceremony, Twitter’s @gov handle had witnessed 1.1 million tweets related to the inauguration.
In 2011, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) moved to its own data centers, which has considerably reduced the incidents of service outages due to server overload.
Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) shares plunged 3.62% to $52.92 at 11:56 AM EST.
