Waves of Synchronized Tweets From Japan Have Forced Twitter to Redo Its System · Global Voices
Nevin Thompson

Screenshot of Japanese Twitter.
No one Tweets like the Japanese, according to a recent Wired article. In fact, Japan's behavior while using the popular microblogging service has, in the past, caused Twitter's network to crash.
The cause? According to Twitter, at certain times of the year, Japanese people like to share Twitter updates at exactly the same time.
For example, on New Year's Eve 2012, almost every Japanese Twitter user tweeted at exactly the same time — at 12 a.m., at the exact start of the New Year — causing Twitter to crash.
It's not just New Year:
Last August, it also held firm when the Japanese helped set a new tweets-per-second record as they all tweeted at the arrival of a particular moment in the television airing of an animated movie called Castle in the Sky.
Japanese Twitter users had broken tweets-per-second records previously during men and women's World Cup matches.
As a result, Twitter had to come up with an entirely new architecture, thanks to Japanese Twitter users.
Roughly 30% of Internet users in Japan used Twitter in May 2013, compared to only 26% of Internet users in the United States, according to comScore's 2013 Japan Digital Future in Focus report.
Read more about Twitter's solution on Wired.