Wimbledon final beats Olympics’ Twitter stats

The climax of this year’s Wimbledon men’s tennis final sparked a twitter frenzy, with more than 120,000 messages per minute sent on the micro-blogging network – a bigger spike than was recorded during last summer’s Olympic games.

According to official Twitter stats, traffic on the site peaked during the dying moments of the game at 17.25 BST when 120,000 tweets per-minute were logged – beating the 116,000 tweets per-minute logged during the Spice Girls’ performance in the London Olympics opening ceremony, which was the largest spike of last year’s games.

“Over the last 12 hours alone, the Wimbledon final has been mentioned more than 3.4 million times on Twitter, according to Lewis Wiltshire, Twitter UK’s head of sport, in a blog post published yesterday.

Victor Andy Murray’s “Can’t believe what’s just happened!!!!!!!” tweet, sent shortly after the match concluded, has also now been retweeted more than 89,000 times and favourite more than 68,000 times.

At 1.9 million followers, Murray added more than 131,000 followers over the last day, and saw a 20% increase in follower numbers over the course of the championships, Twitter said.