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Donovan's Game-Winning Goal Spurs Second Largest Web Traffic Spike Ever

by Caleb Johnson on June 23, 2010 at 06:15 PM

Landon Donovan Spikes Net
If you missed Landon Donovan's game-winning goal in the waning minutes of the USA's World Cup match against Algeria, you missed a milestone moment in American soccer and the Internet. According to Mashable, Internet traffic on 100 major news sites, as tracked by Akamai's Net Usage Index, spiked to a whopping 11.2 million visitors-per-minute after Donovan nailed the net. While that's not quite as high as the 12 million visitors-per-minute increase the site tracked on the first day of World Cup action, it still puts the goal heard 'round the world ahead of the 2008 presidential election, and makes it the second highest Internet traffic spike ever recorded.

This insane jump knocked Yahoo! Sports offline for a brief time, and, as we experienced firsthand, left Twitter users staring at that infuriating fail whale while the site was slammed beyond capacity. When Twitter finally got it together, tweets containing "USA" accounted for 6-percent of the site's total number. Just imagine what will happen if the US men's soccer team continues to advance in the tournament? The Internet better call in reinforcements if it hopes to handle the traffic that would come along with a deep run by the red, white and blue. [From: Mashable]

Tags: data, donovan, football, Internet, Landon Donovan, record, Soccer, sports, top, Web, WorldCup, WorldCup2010

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