Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres managed to bring down Twitter last night by posting a celebrity-packed selfie to the site. It was retweeted 2.6 million times.
The pic showed DeGeneres along with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong'o, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Jared Leto and Kevin Spacey. It single-handedly managed a rare feat - breaking the record for most retweets and knocking Twitter off the web.
DeGeneres' photo quickly shot passed the 1 million tweet mark and eventually brought down Twitter for several minutes after the photo went live. Along the way, it broke the world record for most retweeted tweet. DeGeneres said before the show that she wanted to set a record for the most retweeted selfie in history. Mission accomplished.
"We crashed and broke Twitter. We have made history. See, Meryl [Streep], what we did, you and I?" DeGeneres said at around 11 p.m. "It's back up again so it has the most retweets ever and we are all winners tonight. That's what it means."
Technically, the photo was taken by Cooper. DeGeneres did give him some credit saying she wished the actor's arm was longer so more people could have been included.
The selfie's millions of retweets by the star's 26.9 million followers easily beat out the previous title holder, one showing President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle's celebratory hug following his re-election. That one received a mere 781,436 retweets.
The record-breaking tweet was only one of many posted by the Oscar's host. She posted several additional selfies with various Oscar winners taken backstage.
The outage was noted by Twitter in a post. "Between 19:05 and 19:29 PST today, some users may have experienced issues viewing and sending Tweets on twitter.com and Twitter's mobile apps," was posted on the site's status page.
The Oscars tweet easily beat out the top tweets from 2013, which included the death announcements of Cory Monteith, 394,000 retweets; and Paul Walker, 389,512 retweets. Bringing some levity to the this list was One Direction band member Niall Horan's birthday tweet that he gave himself that was retweeted 363,502 times.
Some other Oscar night Twitter news included a post by Guardian Film, stating that Russian TV canceled the live broadcast because Jared Leto mentioned the unrest taking place in the Ukraine. Russia's state-run TV One said the live show was canceled so it could show coverage of the situation.
