20 Million Tweets as Sandy Struck
Twitter users flocked to the micro-messaging network this week as Hurricane Sandy swept through the eastern U.S. seaboard, sending more than 20 million tweets about the storm between Saturday and Thursday, the company said.
This far exceeds the 13.7 million tweets sent during the Super Bowl in February, typically the largest media event of the year.
Founded in 2006, Twitter has sought to position itself as a “second screen” media product that users can pull up on their smartphones while watching events like the Super Bowl or the Olympics on television.
But the service has shone as a communication channel during major disasters, such as in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan.
Twitter, which has been susceptible to occasional outages, stayed up glitch-free this week, serving at times as a vital source of information for afflicted residents.
The number of times that users in New York City loaded their home timeline from a mobile device peaked around 9 p.m. Monday night, around the time an explosion at a Consolidated Edison transformer knocked out power, more than doubling the total from the previous two days, the company said, without providing details.
The 20 million tweets included the terms “sandy,” “hurricane,” “#sandy,” and “#hurricane,” the company said
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO