Japan Anime News: Laputa: Castle in the Sky causes internet frenzy. 2chan servers go down, twitter and nico nico douga survive

On August 2nd, Nihon TV aired a rerun of the Ghibli classic film "Laputa: Castle in the Sky". At approximately 11:55pm, when the two lead characters Sheeta and Pazu use the Magic Devastation Spell "Balse", Japanese internet users cast their own "Balse" spells on Twitter, the video hosting site niconico douga, and the forum board 2channel.

"Yeah now we're gonna destroy da internetz! lol"

This has been a popular act since 2009. On the December 9th, 2011, Balse was tweeted 25,088 times per second, which was later officially announced as a new Tweets-per-second world record.

Although originally Twitter Japan asked for users to refrain from simultaneously tweeting in fear of their servers, they later withdrew their earlier comment and embraced the ritual, calling it a "Balse Festival".

Niconico went as far as to challenge users to make a World Record of "Balse" tweets during their streaming of live commentary of the film from the Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki.

challenge accepted

This year, the amount of tweets per second reached a new record of 143,199.

Twitter and niconico survived the onslaught of tweets whereas 2channel servers could not succumb to the spells.