Ellen DeGeneres broke Twitter records with her star-studded selfie at the Oscars last night. Her photo featuring Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, and Meryl Streep, among others became the first photo to be retweeted more than two million times.
If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
- Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
But not everyone was excited about the retweet record. On-call engineers at Twitter seemed more than a little stressed out when the selfie went viral.
- Vincent Chu (@vincentchu) March 3, 2014
Twitter was so overloaded from Ellen's selfie that it briefly crashed around 10 p.m. EST. Service was back to normal after about 20 minutes.
OH in the Twitter control center incident conference call: "Ellen just said, 'We crashed Twitter.'" "Great."
- Marcel Molina (@noradio) March 3, 2014
According to one engineer, this group took shots every time Ellen mentioned Twitter during the broadcast.
current on call status pic.twitter.com/DU5AvHX8Ih
- brian wickman (@wickman) March 3, 2014
@evanm @vincentchu we're still here, so high 5's all around for surviving Ellen RT-pocalypse @twittereng! pic.twitter.com/nzDGlxNpG5 #Oscars2014
- ChrisArchitect (@chrisarchitect) March 3, 2014
Watching the oscars next to @twitter engineer on call: priceless
- Evan Meagher (@evanm) March 3, 2014