Twitter hits a peak of 12K tweets per second during Super Bowl

Twitter users sent 12,233 tweets per second at the end of last night’s big game.

The Super Bowl halftime show featuring Madonna inspired 10,245 tweets per second.

Just one month ago, the service had 9,420 tweets per second during a Sunday football game featuring Tim Tebow. For contrast, Twitter saw a peak of 8,868 tweets per second during Beyoncé’s MTV music video awards show pregnancy announcement and just 5,106 tweets per second as the news of Osama bin Laden’s death was announced.

However, the all-time record for most tweets per second goes to Castle in the Sky, a Japanese anime show that set the bar at 25,088 tweets per second during a broadcast in December 2011.

Twitter may or may not be a big hit with anime fans around the globe, but we do know that Twitter is huge in Japan — bigger than Facebook, in fact, with around 25 million Japanese users hitting the site each month.

Twitter is also getting into the Super Bowl ads game. “This year we’re introducing a Twitter twist,” the company announced on its blog.

“Immediately after the game, you can replay all of the ads that aired during the game and tweet votes for your favorites on adscrimmage.twitter.com.”

The company said it will tally the votes and announce the winners on February 12, 2011, a week after the Super Bowl.