Papal announcement web traffic rivals Super Bowl

The announcement of Pope Francis caused a Super Bowl-like stir on the Web.

The Internet exploded with traffic on Wednesday afternoon as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected as pontiff. Social media sites such as Facebook lit up, and Twitter said it peaked at 130,000 tweets per minute.

That's nearly as much traffic as the 150,000 tweet-per-minute peak of this year's Super Bowl and double the 70,000 tweets per minute users fired off during the Oscars telecast last month. In all, Twitter said there were 7 million total tweets sent Wednesday about the papacy.

Overall Web traffic peaked at 32% above normal Wednesday, according to Akamai's real-time monitor. About 20% of the world's Internet traffic flows through Akamai's servers, making it one of the largest content delivery networks on Earth.

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