It took about 18 months for Twitter to go from its first tweet — sent five years ago Monday — to getting 500,000 users.
Now, an average of almost 500,000 new accounts are registered each day.
It took three years, two months, and a day for a user to send the billionth tweet across the massively popular social media service.
Now, a billion tweets are sent every eight days.
“Over these years, Twitter has matured and made an impact in the areas of social responsibility, politics, sports, media, and more,” the company wrote in a blog post Monday, celebrating its fifth anniversary.
“The people who use Twitter have made it what it is today, and on our fifth birthday, it’s the people that make Twitter special who we are celebrating.”
Twitter has grown into an online behemoth with unquestionable influence not only in the digital world but offline too.
Just ask reporters on Parliament Hill, who were more than a little surprised in February when the prime minister’s spokesman announced a trip to Washington to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama. Not by press release, or during a press conference or scrum, but by tweet.
And then there’s the recent case of Charlie Sheen, who responded to losing his job on the hit TV show Two and a Half Men by creating a Twitter account and reaching out to his fans directly.
He’s quickly amassed three million followers, which no doubt helped him launch the 20-date My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option tour.
Twitter has grown so big, so fast that it’s now struggling just to keep the dreaded fail whale (a cartoon whale that pops up when Twitter goes down) from appearing before users.
In another blog post, Twitter’s engineering team recounts the efforts that have gone on behind the scenes since a 10-hour outage in June.
The team came up with a plan to upgrade and stabilize its infrastructure and arranged for the transfer of all its data, which amounted to 20 terabytes (that’s 20.9 million megabytes) worth of 140-character-or-less tweets.
“This move gives us the capacity to deliver tweets with greater reliability and speed,” the blog post reads.