Thanksgiving was Instagram's busiest day ever

GlobalPost

Ten million photos of turkeys, cranberry sauce, pie and "turducken" turned Thanksgiving Day 2012 into Instagram's busiest day ever.

Users uploaded photos to the mobile photo sharing service at a peak rate of 226 per second, the company said on its website. 

The rate hovered over 200 photos a second for several hours on Thursday as Americans across the country sat down for the holiday dinner. 

"We're thrilled to see people use Instagram to share their holidays," Instagram said in a statement.

"Whether celebrating with friends and family or sharing photos with them halfway across the globe, we're excited to see the intimacy and immediacy of the Instagram experience bring us all closer together over this holiday season."

Instagram typically sees about 5 million photos uploaded every day and Thanksgiving more than doubled the number of photos uploaded the day before, reports USA Today. 

The hashtag #thanksgiving beat the previous record of 800,000 photos shared when super storm Sandy struck the East Coast.

Another huge day for the company was Election Day 2012 where Instagrammers tagged more than 100,000 photos with #iVoted and about 150,000 with #election2012, reports PC Mag. 

After the election was called for President Barack Obama, Instagram users uploaded photos at 2.1 times the normal rate. 

The two-year old company is a favorite of Facebook users and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently paid out $1 billion to acquire the company. 

Forbes reports that the price seemed "obscenely high" to many observers at the time but that Instagram is still growing and generating high traffic levels. 

[View the story "Turkey pics break Instagram record" on Storify]
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