The biggest highlights of Super Bowl XLVI — the thrilling final seconds and Madonna's halftime performance — lit up social media, setting a record for the most tweets per second (TPS) on Twitter for any sporting event.
As the New England Patriots' final Hail Mary pass fell to the ground and the New York Giants emerged with a 21-17 win, the number of tweets spiked to 12,233, the highest number for any event in the United States since Twitter began tracking such things. During the final three minutes of the game, when Eli Manning led the Giants down the field for what would be the winning touchdown, Twitter averaged 10,000 TPS. Those numbers dwarfed last year's Super Bowl, which topped out at 4,064 tweets per second.
Madonna's halftime show scored 10,245 TPS at the peak. There was a five-minute stretch of the halftime show where people were firing off tweets at a rate of 8,000 per second.
Twitter, naturally, tweeted all the new records. And as big as these numbers may seem, they're dwarfed by the Dec. 9 television broadcast of the film Castle in the Sky. The movie drew an astonishing 25,088 tweets per second.
Football has been good to Twitter in 2012. The third-highest rate of TPS (9,420) came on Jan. 8, when Tim Tebow threw a touchdown pass on the first play of overtime as the Denver Broncos upset the Pittsburgh Steelers, 29-23.
The Super Bowl and halftime were the first two events to top 10,000 TPS in the United States.
