Everyone in Japan loves Studio Ghibili's Laputa: Castle in the Sky. So much in fact that viewers shout the magical word Barusu! together with the protagonists at the end of the film which brings the Castle down from the sky.
And it also brings down Twitter's servers.
Every new years when the show gets broadcast on national TV, techies at Twitter prepare themselves as the phenomenon called the Barusu festival happens-- everyone tweets those magical words at the same time and the servers get screwed, although the techies have been doing a good job in avoiding that. The anime is known for holding the world record of 33,388 tweets per second from back in 2013, a phenomenon which even its creator Hayao Miyazaki himself is puzzled at.
This year's Barusu festival didn't bring Twitter down to its Knees, but the techies probably felt they got sucker punched two weeks later. The famous idol group SMAP made a live apology, which caused a huge buzz amongst the general Jp public and ended up crashing Twitter.
Twitter figures for the live apology hasn't been released yet, but the situation brings a new scenario for Twitter techies to chew on-- a mass of people were not only tweeting, but also word searching for other viewer's reactions because the live apology was so enigmatic--a situation that's certainly different from the Barusu festival. At the current time, word searching for
Smap is disabled on the SNS.
The idol group has been active since 1988 and a number of characters in SNK's KOF franchise have names derived from its members.
Reflex Tester
