Steve Jobs's death breaks Twitter record with 10,000 tweets per second

The death of Apple's visionary leader Steve Jobs has provoked the biggest online reaction of any event in recent history, as the official twitter figures reached 10,000 tweets per second.

According to social media monitoring firm SR7, the huge reaction eclipses the previous biggest event, Beyonce's performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she revealed she was pregnant, which generated a record 8868 tweets per second.

Other huge online events included Japan beating USA in the women's soccer World Cup finals in July that generated 7196 tweets per second and Osama bin Laden's death that led to over 5000 tweets per second, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

Also, 5530 tweets per second were recorded during the Japan earthquake and tsunami in March, and 3966 tweets per second were generated during the British royal wedding.

According to Twitter, across the whole of 2010 there were an average of 600 tweets a second.