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Here's Ellen's Star-Stuffed Oscar Selfie That Broke Twitter

By Mark Memmott
Published March 3, 2014 at 9:05 AM EST

A group selfie that host Ellen DeGeneres organized at the start of Sunday's Oscars show is now in the record books.

According to Twitter, it's the "most retweeted Tweet, ever." As of about 8:45 a.m. ET Monday, the shot of Ellen with stars such as Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt had been retweeted nearly 2.6 million times.

That's far more than the 782,000 or so retweets for the previous record holder — the 2012 "four more years" photo of President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama hugging.

Ellen's twitpic is also being credited with "breaking" Twitter for a short time. According to The Associated Press, "Twitter sent out an apology because all of the retweeting disrupted service for more than 20 minutes after 10 p.m. ET."

Bloomberg News says that's not necessarily bad news for Twitter. The temporary disruption, it notes, brought the microblogging site "tons of publicity."

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got into the spirit with a tweet of its own: "Sorry, our bad."

It was actor Bradley Cooper, by the way, who took the photo. The Guardian initially identified the selfie snapper as Bradley Manning — the Army private now known as Chelsea Manning who was responsible for the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Mark Memmott
Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
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