Twitter posts eye-popping traffic numbers on fifth birthday

Twitter users currently post more tweets in one week than the service racked up in the first three years of its existence.

In a blog post marking the fifth anniversary of the popular micro blogging service, Twitter has revealed new insight into the amount of information being generated by its users.

The company said that it currently handles some one billion tweets per week, reflecting an exponential jump in activity in recent years. By contrast, the site's first billion tweets took three years, two months and one day to generate.

On average last month, Twitter users sent 140 million tweets per day. Over the same period last year, Twitter averaged just 50 million tweets daily. The current record for tweet loads came on New Year's Day 2011, when users averaged 6,939 posts per second.

The site currently estimates that it signed up some 460,000 new accounts per day last month, and on 12 March some 572,000 new Twitter accounts were created.

The figures come as Twitter is preparing to mark the fifth anniversary of the site's launch. Founder Jack Dorsey issued the first tweet on 21 March, 2006.

Since then, Twitter has grown to become one of the most popular services on the web and its employee ranks have swelled to more than 400 people. Recent valuations of the company have estimated Twitter's worth to be between $8bn and $10bn.

In that time, new challenges have also arisen for the company. In addition to improving capacity and uptime, Twitter has had to deal with the emergence of security concerns and dealings with partner platforms and services.