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Win for Samsung as Oscars ‘selfie’ crashes Twitter…
Tue, 4th Mar 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt - now that’s what you call a selfie.

Taken by Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres, the snap sent the Twittersphere into meltdown, crashing the site for over 20 minutes as a result.

Before even midnight Sunday the image had been retweeted over two million times, smashing the previous record set by President Barack Obama following his re-election victory in 2012.

The genius marketing stunt, as many media figures are branding it, was taken on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, in what has been described as an epic piece of product placement by the tech giant.

"I thought it would crash," DeGeneres admitted after the awards.

"But I didn't know everyone would do it. What's funny is that Lupita's brother is the most prominent.

“And then Jared came running over to be in it. And Angie got it in. I didn't expect all that."

Following the snap, the image racked up a whopping 700,000 retweets and nearly 200,000 favourites in just 30 minutes, leading to an outage on the social media website.

"Between 19:05 and 19:29 PST today, some users may have experienced issues viewing and sending tweets on twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile apps,” Twitter reported.

“Traffic was redirected away from the components that were experiencing problems, and the issue has now been resolved."