Landon Donovan Broke the Internet

When Landon Donovan scored the biggest goal of his career, sending the US team to the second round of the World Cup, his goal had reverberations off the pitch around the globe. Accoring to the Akamai Net Usage index, a traffic meter that tracks real-time Internet users, traffic went up to 11.2 million hits a minute on the top 100 news sites.

Donovan's goal singlehandedly knocked Twitter out of service as hundreds of thousands of tweets entered their servers all at once. The traffic spike was 190% more than usual, and was higher than the 2008 Presidential election. The surge in traffic caused Yahoos servers to fail.

Who says America isn't a soccer country? (Or at least a really good bandwagon nation.)

[PopSci]