Soccer World Cup Set Internet Visitor Records

According to a report by Akamai, the Soccer World Cup pushed the Internet to a new record on Friday. Traffic to news related websites started a heavy climb Friday afternoon, reaching nearly 12.1 million visitors to these websites per minute.

Traffic started dropping later Friday afternoon, but stayed well above the normal levels. At the start of the opening soccer match, between South Africa and Mexico, the Internet was most active and stayed at these levels throughout the France – Uruguay game.

The previous Internet traffic record was set to be 8.5 million visitors per minute to the World Wide Web when Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008.

During the course of Saturday afternoon, traffic to news related websites were steady at 5.7 million visitors per minute.