The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.
As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.
It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.
Record breaking Super Bowl XLVI
This Super Bowl broke all kinds of records, including the highest tweet per second count. Fans all over the world managed to tweet 10,245 times per second at the half-time show with Madonna, and over 12,000 times per second at the conclusion of the game.
The highest Tweets per second #SuperBowl peak came at the end of the game: 12,233. 2nd highest was during Madonna’s performance: 10,245.
— Twitter (@twitter) February 6, 2012
There were also records set in terms of the actual game of football that was being played. Tom Coughlin, Giants, became the oldest winning Super Bowl coach at 65. Tom Brady, Patriots, set four records, including most completions with 127 in his Super Bowl appearances so far.
Superbowl.com response time
After digging through the data provided by our Pingdom monitor probes, which checked on Superbowl.com once every minute, we can only conclude that the site held up well to what must have been significant traffic yesterday.
In our data we only included the results from our US-based probes, and although the monitoring of the Super Bowl site is ongoing, in the chart we’re only showing the response time for February 5, 2012. All times are EST.
As you can see, there was a speak in traffic for a couple of hours at the beginning of Super Bowl day, which we can only attribute to the US waking up and wanting to get up to date on what was happening.
Then response time was fairly even and took a slight dip before kick off at 6:30 pm. After the game, the response dropped even further, just to go back up at the end of the day. Average response time for yesterday was 259 ms.
The monitoring continues
We continue to monitor the Super Bowl website as well as many other sports sites around the world, and as soon as another major sports event rolls around, we’ll give you the latest on how the site is faring.
For now, let’s congratulate the New York Giants and the guys running Superbowl.com to a job well done.
