Tuesday's earthquake left us all a-Twitter
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Tuesday afternoon's 5.8 magnitude earthquake rocked more than just the Earth's crust.
The tremor also caused a Twitterquake.
Within a minute of the 1:51 p.m. earthquake, Twitter displayed more than 40,000 earthquake-related tweets, according to the microblogging site. At 7:26 p.m., the site reported it registered about 5,000 tweets per second.
"For context, this TPS is more than Osama Bin Laden's death & on par w/ the Japanese quake," it tweeted.
"Earthquake" was the most popular trend on Twitter in cities across the East Coast Tuesday, according to the site.
According to Trendistic, a Twitter analysis tool that monitors trending topics by the hour, nearly 15 percent of tweets worldwide mentioned "earthquake" at 2 p.m. Tuesday,
On Facebook, the term "earthquake" appeared in the status updates of almost 3 million users at 1:55 p.m. EST, just four minutes after the earthquake, according to the social networking giant.
Google Hot Trends, a service that reports Google's fastest-rising searches, showed that those for Tuesday in the United States included "earthquakes today" (1), "earth quake" (2) and "earthquake map" (3).
The Federal Emergency Management Agency reported cell phone congestion and encouraged people to use other modes of communication.
"We request that members of the public use email or text messages if possible to communicate for the next few hours, except in cases of emergency, so that emergency officials can continue to receive and respond to urgent calls," said FEMA spokeswoman Rachel Racusen in a news release Tuesday.
AT&T and Verizon reported no physical damage to their cellular towers, but both carriers saw congestion on their networks.
"We have no reports of network damage due to the earthquake in the Northeast, but we are seeing heavy call volumes," AT&T tweeted at 3:44 p.m. Tuesday.
Verizon Wireless also reported unusually high traffic on its network.
"There was some network congestion for some customers," Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Laura Merritt said. "That was a direct result of spikes in calling in the eastern part of the country."
Customers also clogged Verizon land lines.
"All of the capacity on the network was being utilized." said Lee Gierczynski, media relations manager for Verizon. "It's a fairly common occurrence when you have an event like that."
High land-line traffic began to subside after 20 or 30 minutes of heavy usage, Mr. Gierczynski said.
The earthquake had a similar impact on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's website, post-gazette.com.
The newspaper's website received twice as much traffic from 2 to 3 p.m. as the previous day, and 78 percent of that traffic was due to the earthquake story. Site traffic remained higher than average until 5 p.m.
Post-Gazette mobile traffic from 2 to 3 p.m. more than tripled from Monday.
First Published August 25, 2011 12:00 am
