The royal wedding has reportedly broken previous records for the biggest live streaming audience online for a single event - narrowly beating even the 2010 World Cup.
Early online traffic reports indicated that online video streaming companies from all over the world saw record-breaking audiences for the event, with most of them managing to handle the peak in traffic without crashing.
Akamai, Internet service provider and traffic monitor, recorded close to three million simultaneous viewers - the previous record was 1.6 million concurrent live stream viewers during the World Cup last year.
Royal records
Livestream, which partnered with the Associated Press, Entertainment Tonight, CBS and others to broadcast the wedding online, recorded a peak of 300 000 concurrent viewers. Company CEO Max Haot reportedly stated that two million unique viewers were expected before the broadcast ended.
While official figures are yet to be released, YouTube's live streaming of the event on the Royal Channel is estimated to have attracted 400 million viewers.
Palace officials are said to have collaborated with Google in order to deliver the live coverage to a global online audience. Engineers were on standby throughout the event to deal with any problems.
Not in the top five
While a record number of people watched the live stream, the wedding has only been ranked as the sixth biggest Web news event of all time - losing out to major sporting events and the 2010 US mid-term elections.
According to Akami, there were 5.3 million peak page views per minute during the wedding. This number falls well short of the 10.3 million peak page views per minute recorded during the simultaneous 2010 World Cup and the longest ever Wimbledon match.
The BBC Online struggled to deal with the increased traffic, and visitors to the site's live stream of the wedding were occasionally greeted by an error message.
Yahoo managed to drive its largest traffic numbers for a single event last week, and preliminary data shows Yahoo sites serving royal wedding content drove 400 million page views on Friday, slightly higher than the traffic levels experienced following the Japan earthquake.
Social buzz
During the week of the wedding, Google searches for “Kate Middleton” reportedly even surpassed those for “Lady Gaga”.
Google News and Twitter appeared to cope better with the major event than in the past when both services were brought down by the traffic generated by news of Michael Jackson's death.
In the week leading up to the wedding, 2.1 million tweets mentioned the event, and nine of the top 10 trending topics were related to the royal wedding. They ranged from the hashtags #RoyalWedding and #proudtobebritish, to the words "They kissed".
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