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A movie many may have long forgotten is the reason behind a worldwide record number of tweets per second.

The television airing of Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 film, "Castle in the Sky" in Japan on Aug. 3 had a huge audience, "and at one moment they took to Twitter so much that we hit a one-second peak of 143,199 tweets per second," wrote Raffi Krikorian, Twitter's vice-president, platform engineering, on the site's blog.

Normally, Twitter handles more than 500 million tweets a day, or about 5,700 tweets a second "on average," Krikorian wrote. "This particular spike was around 25 times greater than our steady state."

"Castle in the Sky" was released in the U.S. in 1989, and its story — about a young princess and a boy with a magic crystal trying to outrace bad guys to save a legendary floating castle — captivated the hearts of many.



The word "balus" was what was so heavily tweeted, noted The Hollywood Reporter. It's a "magic word in the Miyazaki universe" that "triggers a spell of destruction when said by characters at the beloved film's climax," the publication said.

The previous record for tweets per second was 33,388 was set Jan. 1, 2013 as people all over the world rang in the new year with good wishes via tweets, a Twitter spokeswoman said.

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But it's not "Castle in the Sky"'s first time as a Twitter title holder. When the movie aired on Japanese TV on Dec. 9, 2011, it resulted in 25,088 tweets per second, which at that time was the most tweets per second ever recorded.

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