Ellen broke the internet

The Academy Awards is always one of the most looked forward to events on American television as it is a coming together of some of the most recognisable faces from across the world. We get to watch live as our idols and heroes walk down that infamous red carpet, showing off their dresses hoping that the next morning they are in all of the magazines labeled a ‘hit’ rather than a miss. The event is broadcast live across the world and as the anticipation builds we are left waiting for the first award… or for someone to fall over, swear or do something crazy.

The 86th annual awards is shown on the ABC network and the network claimed that the ceremony drew 43 million television viewers in the United States, delivering the biggest audience for the awards in a decade. Unfortunately for ABC however their flagship app was much less of a success story. ABC had been promoting their app for a few weeks prior to the ceremony and were championing the fact that this was the first awards to be streamed, live through their interactive app.

However thousands of people across the country were left frustrated after being able to watch the red carpet for an hour for the app began to crash only 15 minutes before the start of the ceremony. The live video through the Watch ABC app was “down nationwide due to a traffic overload/greater than expected,” a network rep said in an email. As of 10:45 p.m. Eastern, the feeds were back up, according to the rep, declining to provide additional info. But the damage was already done and the lack of server power was causing long delays, lagging and even more crashing into the night. With the ABC channel not having sound throughout all of Mercy College as well, many students were relying on the app to watch the ceremony.

It seems that the internet has fallen apart since last night’s ceremony, with the ABC app and the sound on ABC’s Network failure I didn’t think it could get much worse. Even with the intense power supplies to the servers of international companies, many of them just can’t cope with extraneous amounts of traffic. Ellen DeGeneres hosted the awards for her second time last night and vowed to break the Twitter record for most retweeted tweet ever and thus breaking the 2012 tweet from the White House saying “4 more years” which collected just over 750,000 retweets. Ellen Posted a selfie taken by Bradley Cooper that included famous faces such as, Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Ellen DeGeneres, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, Angeline Jolie, Channing Tatum and Julia Roberts.

Within half an hour, the selfie had broken the record set by Obama and crashed the servers at Twitter HQ. Twitter declined to comment on the service glitches except for a statement on its status blog: “Between 19:05 and 19:29 PST today, some users may have experienced issues viewing and sending tweets on twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile apps. Traffic was redirected away from the components that were experiencing problems, and the issue has now been resolved.” But Twitter did celebrate DeGeneres’ record-making moment with this tweet: “The envelope please … to @TheEllenShow — this is now the most retweeted tweet with over 1 million RTs. Congrats!”

The tweet has now gone on to break the 2 million mark and is likely to break 3 million retweets in the next few days.

 

Twitter Inc has also claimed that some 14.7 million Oscar-related tweets were sent worldwide during the telecast, while Nielsen’s social media data overall social media activity around the ceremony increased by 75 percent from last year.

The ceremony itself was very successful, the only major slip up was by John Travolta when he introduced Idina Menzel and the “Wickedly talented Adela Dezeem” to which people on social media obviously mocked him and instantly created a fake account for Adela Dezeem, which tweeted “Thank You Jorn Tromolo”

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“12 Years a Slave” took top honors at the Awards by winning the Oscar for best picture. Added to Lupita Nyong’o’s win for supporting actress and John Ridley’s for adapted screenplay, the film took three awards total. The top winner for the night, however, was “Gravity” with seven awards. In addition to Alfonso Cuarón’s win for director, the film also won for visual effects, sound mixing, sound editing, cinematography, film editing and original score. Other winners in the top categories include Cate Blanchett for lead actress, Matthew McConaughey for lead actor and Jared Leto for supporting actor.