Instagram had a big election night too, photo uploads climbed to 2.1x normal rate

Instagram photos were flying fast and furious as soon as news networks called the 2012 presidential election for Barack Obama.

The Facebook-owned app said Wednesday night that the rate of photos uploaded each second to the service spiked to 2.1 times the normal rate immediately following the pronouncement that Obama had been elected to a second term.

What the 2.1x spike corresponds to in terms of the actual number of photos uploaded per second, we don’t really know — because Facebook wouldn’t tell me (of course I asked).

“People from around the United States tagged more than 100,000 photos with #IVoted, and 150,000 photos with #election2012, allowing folks to share their own — and tune into others’ — election night experience in real-time,” the Instagram team said in a postmortem blog post.

For comparison purposes, members of the mobile photo-sharing network inundated Instagram with as much as 10 photos per second related to superstorm Sandy on Monday, October 29.

The surge in Instagram activity should shock no one. The photo phenom has proven to be a platform were the masses go to not only post filtered shots of their surroundings but to also capture and react to major events.

Instagram spikes aside, Twitter proved to be the most electric social network on election night. Tweets peaked at nearly 875,000 messages per minute, an all-time record for the company.

Photo credit: LizNemmers/Flickr