Last night, Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres decided she wanted to try and break the record for most-retweeted Tweet ever—President Obama's reelection victory Tweet got over 780,000. To beat his record, she pulled in celebrities like Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'o, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey and more to pose for a selfie, which was taken by Bradley Cooper. And she succeeded, with the Tweet hitting over 1 million RTs by 8:17 p.m. PST. Of course, that kind of superstar virality meant Twitter engineers were having near-breakdowns.
Right before Ellen posted the selfie, engineer Vincent Chu Tweeted:
<GULP> #oscars
— Vincent Chu (@vincentchu) March 3, 2014
Other Twitter employees also reacted:
OH: "I hope we can break the record for most retweets."
Eng on call in my living room: "Oh fuck."
— Marcel Molina (@noradio) March 3, 2014
Then the selfie was unleashed:
If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
current on call status pic.twitter.com/DU5AvHX8Ih
— brian wickman (@wickman) March 3, 2014
OH in the Twitter control center incident conference call:
"Ellen just said, 'We crashed Twitter.'"
"Great."
— Marcel Molina (@noradio) March 3, 2014
Twitter engineer @vincentchu was on call during the Oscars: pic.twitter.com/23wazITGX3
— Glenn Vanderburg (@glv) March 3, 2014
@dysinger @glv @superstrong it was shots each time @TheEllenShow mentioned "Twitter"
— Vincent Chu (@vincentchu) March 3, 2014
@evanm 1 million is the new 100.
— Vincent Chu (@vincentchu) March 3, 2014
So Ellen managed to break records and Twitter was so hot that it crashed briefly—but the bigger winner was Frank Underwood:
My photobombing gets better and better! @TheEllenShow #oscars pic.twitter.com/LyOkEFgThT
— Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) March 3, 2014
