The Incredible Numbers Behind Twitter

Five years ago this week, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet. Here’s the first-ever tweet: (not quite a Neil Armstrong-esque declaration but fun nonetheless)

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/29"]

Today, on every measure of growth and engagement, Twitter is growing at a record pace.  According to this Twitter post, Twitter was up and functioning for 3 years, 2 months and 1 day before it notched its one-billionth tweet. Now, the service handles a billion tweets every week.

In the past year alone, the average number of tweets per day has nearly tripled from 50 million to 140 million.

Tweets generally spikes during a significant cultural event, and recent figures have been staggering. On March 11, the day of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, Twitter users exceeded the average daily tweets by 37 million–that’s 177 million tweets in a single day.

Also surging is Twitter’s membership. 572,000 new accounts were created on March 12. For the past month, the average daily sign-up rate has been 460,000 new accounts, and Twitter has also marked a 182% increase in the number of users tweeting from mobile devices in the past year.

As the the number of tweeters has exploded, the service’s staff has been expanding, too. Twitter’s initial team consisted of eight members. On March 14, 2011 the staff numbered exactly 400. Source: Huffington Post

Here are some of the incredible numbers:

Tweets

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

Accounts

• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

Employees

• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.