What Happened Behind The Scenes At Twitter When Ellen Unleashed That Oscar Selfie

When the host of the 86th Academy Awards, Ellen DeGeneres, gathered some of the film industry’s biggest stars for THE selfie...

...it broke Twitter. Literally. For more than 20 minutes Twitter was down. And The Academy posted this:

That star-studded selfie beat President Obama's 'four more years' reelection tweet for the most RTs of all time. So far, Ellen's tweet has garnered over 3 million RTs, while Obama's only amassed 781,000.

But, it seems, not everyone was excited about the retweet record

So, when Ellen made her record-breaking intentions clear, on-call engineers at Twitter seemed more than a little stressed out...

...and, naturally, on-call Twitter engineer Vincent Chu had a brief moment of shock

Then this happened:

...and Vincent Chu kept taking shots every time Ellen mentioned Twitter during the broadcast

An hour later the Twitter engineering team was still hard at work. See:

Eventually, they survived the Ellen RT-pocalypse and posted this:

Twitter published over 14.7 million Oscars-related tweets. Many of the night's most popular tweets were by actually by Ellen herself. Read about THE selfie, here: