Japanese Users Break Tweets Per Second Record · Global Voices
Keiko Tanaka

Japan's netizens broke the world record for tweets per second on August 2, 2013, flooding Twitter with the magic word “balse” [バルス] from the 1986 anime film Castle In the Sky as the movie was broadcast on television in Japan on August 2, 2013.
Users set a new record of 143,199 tweets per second tweeting the word “balse”. It's a recent tradition to post the magic word “balse” on Twitter during reairings of the movie as the characters in the film spell it to destroy the castle.
In cyber world, the huge traffic triggered by netizens publishing the word “balse” online has caused website servers to crash several times in the past. Twitter's server, however, survived the “balse” inundation without an appearance of the “Fail Whale”.
Screenshot from Google Trends for the word “バルス” [balse]