Brazil vs Chile Match Breaks Twitter Record

Brazil's victory over Chile in an agonising penalty shootout that sent the hosts into the World Cup quarter-finals was more frantically tweeted than the Super Bowl, the social media company said on Saturday.

Traffic reached a record pace of 388,985 tweets per minute during the game, beating the 381,605 messages per minute fired during this year's NFL final, Twitter said in a statement.

The peak came when Chile missed their last penalty, propelling Brazil into the quarter-finals.

A total of 16.4 million tweets were sent during the match, surpassing the 12.2 million sent for the opening game in which Brazil beat Croatia 3-1. In absolute numbers the Super Bowl was, however a bigger event, with more than 24.9 million tweets.

People like to use social media to comment on what they watch on TV, making global sports events like the World Cup enormous business opportunities for companies like Twitter.

Brazil is one of Twitter's top global markets. Twitter said on Friday that more than 300 million messages had been sent about the tournament since the group stages of the football competition began, with the event "already becoming one of the most talked about events on Twitter of all time".

Twitter also revealed that Messi kept the top spot as the most tweeted-about player, followed by Brazil's Neymar Jr. and post-bite Suarez. Ronaldo, meanwhile, came in at No. 4.

Thursday's concurrent US vs Germany and Portugal vs Ghana games hit a peak of 6.8 terabits per second in online streaming traffic, according to Akamai Technologies Inc., which helps companies distribute online video and works with more than 50 World Cup online streaming rights holders worldwide. That rate of consumption is a new high for a live-streamed sporting event that Akamai has delivered and "very easily one of -if not the- largest live events that's been delivered on the platform," said spokesman Chris Nicholson.

Written with agency inputs