Brazil's humbling at the hands of Germany has become the most tweeted-about sporting event in history. Social networking giant Twitter said more than 35 million tweets were sent during the World Cup semi-final in Belo Horizonte. Germany crushed the hosts Brazil 7-1 to book their place in the World Cup final, reducing thousands of Brazilian fans to tears and sending social media into meltdown.
The surge of Twitter posts smashed the previous record held by American football's Super Bowl 48, which spawned just under 25 million tweets when it took place earlier this year. Twitter users were clearly in a similarly rampant mood to the German team, with the record for the most tweets per minute also broken in the aftermath of the fifth goal, scored by Real Madrid's Sami Khedira.
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According to Twitter, that prompted a peak of 580,166 tweets per minute, almost 200,000 tweets per minute more than the previous record; which came during Brazil's penalty shootout victory over Chile earlier in the tournament. Facebook also reported a huge spike in traffic during the game, with the Mark Zuckerberg-founded site reporting more than 220 million interactions sent during the game by 66 million people - 16 million of those based in Brazil alone.
Unsurprisingly, Germans were quick to take to social media to celebrate their country reaching the World Cup final, with former player and coach of the national team Jurgen Klinsmann calling the result a "huge piece of football history". Despite missing the game through injury, Neymar was the most talked about player on Facebook with the social media site reporting that he received 10 times the attention of any of his team-mates who did play.
Brazil's suspended captain Thiago Silva was the third-most discussed, showing fans knew the importance of the hosts' missing players. Brazil players Hulk and Dani Alves have both since taken to social media to apologise to fans for the result.