Twitter isn't offering concrete data, but does say that it beat the 10.3 million tweets sent during 2012's first candidate showdown. We've reached out to Facebook to see if it can provide its own statistics.

The heated discussion smashed a few other records, as well. CBSN's young online-only service broke both its hourly and single-day viewership records with about 1.4 million unique viewers. The political predictors at FiveThirtyEight, meanwhile, had their highest single-day traffic to date. And this isn't counting outages -- there are numerous reports of Politifact and Trump's own site going down at the height of the event. There's no guarantee that you'll see a repeat of this server-crushing activity during this election, but it's clear that the internet is much more of a go-to source for election coverage than it was 4 years ago.