About a year ago, Twitter had processed about 1 billion tweets total. That was around the same time that the service struggled to stay online and kept showing us the “fail whale.” Within one year later the company processed an additional 4 billion tweets more. The statistics of the tweets being sent are processed by Gigatweet. The 5 billionth tweet was from Robin Sloan who sent out the tweet “Oh lord.”

Twitter had served 1.6 billion tweets up until this past April, indicating that 3.4 billion tweets were sent out in the last 6 months. Five billion tweets requires a lot of processing power and bandwidth. Its a good thing that Twitter has $155 million in venture capital to keep the servers running. Twitter was co-founded by Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Williams in 2006.