When Brazil was eliminated from the international soccer tournament Copa America in July, Twitter saw 7,166 tweets per second. The current record is 8,868 tweets per second, which was set during the in August, Horwitz noted.

Shawn White, vice president of operations at Keynote Systems, an Internet and mobile monitoring company, told Computerworld that the surge in Twitter traffic after Job's death was staggering.

"We saw it with the death of Michael Jackson and the inauguration of President Obama. Sometimes sites just get overwhelmed," White said. "The pattern we saw [with Twitter] was that things hummed a long pretty normally and then right after the announcement of Steve Jobs' passing, the site slowed."

He noted that the time to access Twitter's homepage for many users went from 3 seconds to 20 or 30 seconds. The site increasingly struggled under the load, with the first error hitting at 8:10 p.m. ET.

Then the availability of Twitter's homepage dropped nearly 40% between 8:50 and 9:05, according to Keynote.