After an epic run, the U.S. women’s soccer team succumbed to Japan today in the final of the Women’s World Cup tournament. And if you were paying attention to your Twitter stream today, you may have seen an influx of Tweets about the game, which ended in a penalty shootout. Twitter just Tweeted that the Women’s World Cup final scored a new record with 7,196 Tweets per second. Even U.S. President Barack Obama joined in Tweeting about the game. And from the Tweet, “today’s end to the Paraguay/Brazil game is now 2nd with 7,666 TPS.”

The Men’s World Cup soccer tournament last year also achieved record engagement on Twitter at the time. For basis of comparison, last year’s men’s World Cup Final marked the largest period of sustained activity for an event in the service’s history, with over 2,000 Tweets per second (TPS) during the last 15 minutes of the match, and 3,051 tweets per second when Spain scored its winning goal in the final match.

Of course, Twitter, which just turned five years old, has grown significantly in the past year, especially in international markets. In May we saw Twitter see a significant peak in Tweets Per Second, following the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death. The event reached a high of 5,106 Tweets per second.

In terms of past events, Super Bowl 2011 saw 4,064 TPS, and the all-time high was New Years Eve 2010 in Japan, which hit 6,939 TPS at its peak. On the day of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in March, Twitter usage reached 5,530 TPS. And during the Royal Wedding in England in April, Twitter reached a peak of 3,966 TPS.

This past week, Twitter announced that its users are sharing 350 billion items per day and 600,000 users are signing up for the service daily.

Crunchbase

• TWITTER

Company: Twitter

Website: twitter.com

Launch Date: March 21, 2006

Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

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