Earlier this week, Japan shattered the record for Tweets per second in a flurry of coordinated social media activity. Servers strained and the Fail Whale threatened to rear its ugly head, but Japanese Twitter users prevailed and sent out, at their peak, 11,000 Tweets a second. That’s nearly 700,000 Tweets per minute!

What event was so earth-shattering, so popular, that it caused so many people to get on Twitter an talk about it? Simple: a Studio Ghibli movie.

It’s no secret that Studio Ghibli is incredibly beloved by pretty much everybody ever, but especially so in Japan. Hayao Miyazaki and his animated films have always been immensely popular their home country, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that when the Studio Ghibli movie “Castle in the Sky” aired on TV for the first time in two years, people got a little excited.

If you don’t know Castle in the Sky, it’s a movie inspired partially by the classic book Gulliver’s Travels (of creepy amusement park fame) that follows the story of two children who discover a floating city from the past.

It’s a well-loved Miyazaki movie that’s been out for over 20 years now and has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. There’s even a life-sized replica of one of the guard robots at the Studio Ghibli museum in Japan!

So when Castle in the Sky started playing on TV, people from all around Japan tuned in to watch this beloved film and went to talk about it with other people online.

I don’t want to spoil this 25-year-old movie for any of you (is there a statute of limitations for movie spoilers?), but at the climax of the movie, the two main characters recite a spell of destruction that, with a single word, destroys the city in the sky: 「バルス」(“bahlus” in the English dub).

It was at that dramatic moment that people all across Japan Tweeted along with the movie, breaking over 11,000 TPS, most of them simply 「バルス」.

The last record for TPS was set at just below 9,000 (not quite over) when music royalty Beyoncé and Jay-Z announced they were expecting a baby, promising to bring into the world the most talented child in music history.

“Castle in the Sky? Whatever!”

And it wasn’t just Twitter that was hit hard by the spell of destruction. The infamous 2ch was temporarily taken down by the sheer number of threads about Castle in the Sky, and other sites like Nico Nico Douga saw a huge surge in traffic too.

So what’s the lesson here? Obviously, Miyazaki films are incredibly popular, and clearly the Japanese love their social media sites.

But what I think is coolest about all of this is how people were basically able to watch this movie together because of social networking. People way down south in Kyushu were hanging out and watching Castle in the Sky with people up north in Hokkaido. How cool is that?

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[via watashi to tokyo]