A few other events brought in ever bigger Twitter spikes.

When the U.S. Women's Gymnastics team won a gold medal, there was a spike of 29,000 tweets per minute, Twitter said. And when U.S. swimmer achieved a record number of Olympic medals, it prompted some 37,000 tweets per minute.

A number of Olympic athletes are helping the Twitter boom by tweeting during the games. For instance, U.S. swimmer won a gold medal on Wednesday afternoon and then later live-tweeted an analysis of his performance during NBC's broadcast of a delayed video of the event.

"Right now I am completely in the zone, I have never felt so relaxed and prepared to fly!!!," he tweeted.

Clary has 18,568 Twitter followers, which is impressive but lages far behind Phelps, who has 912,756 followers.