"Balse", The Most-Tweeted Moment Of All Time

03/08/2013

Over the weekend, classic Studio Ghibli anime Castle in the Sky was on television. And Japan held what it calls a "Balse Festival" (バルス祭り or "barusu matsuri"), which is to simply write "balse" (バルス or "barusu") in a key moment.

The moment was previously planned with many users using bulletin boards and Twitter, reminding each other of the impending Balse Festival.

The anime was first released in 1986. In the climax scene, the Spell of Destruction is cast with the word "balse" to bring down the city named "Laputa".

The moment the word was uttered, many users use Twitter to tweet the word "balse" (バルス). As a result, Twitter was hit by one of the highest and fastest tweet, with 143,199 tweets per second. (August 2 at 7:21:50 PDT; August 3 at 11:21:50 JST).

This number surpassed Twitter's previous record of Castle in the Sky in 2011 when Twitter was hit with 11,349 tweets-per-second.

Not just Twitter, some websites that were livestreaming the anime, at the time of "balse", they were also hit hard, with some had to be taken offline.

Twitter's main office has been contacted by Twitter's Japanese branch prior to the Castle in the Sky broadcast, giving the social media a heads up it could withstand the inevitable pounding.

When the anime was shown in Japan, engineers in San Francisco worked the early morning hours U.S. time as the servers were at the peak, trying to find and implement order-of-magnitudes of efficiency gains

Twitter was able to withstand the clobbering time.