Rihanna’s spectacular Super Bowl 2023 halftime performance and the revelation that she is pregnant broke Twitter on Sunday night.
By 8.38pm, minutes after the end of her set as the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs began the second half of the championship match, there was a huge spike in reported outages on Twitter.
Downdetector clocked 9,922 outages reported as fans of the Barbadian superstar – while suspended on a platform high above the playing field – took to the platform with adulation for her stunning performance and excited questions as to whether she was pregnant.
The site, which tracks user-reported outages, mostly reported outages with the app but there were also problems with the website.
Users reported seeing “tweets are not loading now” error messages.
The apparent crash is likely linked to the huge volume of posts made in the moments after the show.
Super Bowl Sunday is always a huge traffic moment for social media platforms with a perfect storm of traffic from the NFL, the halftime show, the ads and movie trailers.
By 9pm, the number of reported outages had dropped to nearer the normal level.
Somewhat ironically, shortly after the outages were reported, Twitter owner Elon Musk was seen at the State Farm Stadium sitting alongside media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Rihanna played a medley of her greatest on a series of platforms hanging from the roof of the stadium and appeared to be pregnant, triggering wild speculation.
A representative for the singer confirmed the news shortly after the performance.
