This is a fascinating interview with Raffi Krikorian, Vice President of Platform Engineering at Twitter.

Ever wonder how many tweets go out at any given time? Or what event caused the biggest traffic burst ever recorded at Twitter? This was a surprise to me:

So what you’re referring to is the Castle in the Sky event is what we call it internally, and that was a television show that aired in Tokyo. We did our new record of around 34,000 tweets a second came into Twitter during that event. Normally, Twitter experiences something on order of 5,000 to 10,000 tweets a second, so this is pretty far out of our standard operating bounds.

An interesting read, even if you are not a systems architect.