VIDEO Felix Baumgartner Space Balloon Jump Sees UK Internet Traffic Surge

Broadband ISP TalkTalk reports that internet traffic over its UK network spiked at 460Gbps (Gigabits per second) on Sunday evening (“significantly more” than normal) as customers went online to watch Austrian pilot Felix Baumgartner jump to Earth from a balloon (Red Bull Stratos) at the edge of space.

The 43-year-old ascended until he was 24.24 miles (38.5km) above the Earth (stratosphere) before stepping out to perform a record breaking skydive, which saw the pilot break the sound barrier and reach speeds of up to 833.9 Miles per hour (Mach 1.24).

The live stream on YouTube ended up being watched by 8 million people, the largest number of concurrent live streams in their history. But for TalkTalk the busiest Sunday their servers have ever seen was actually on 19th September 2012 when Apple released their latest iOS6 software, which peaked the ISPs traffic at 525Gbps.

Thankfully, despite falling into a dangerous spin and having his visor fog up, Baumgartner ended up landing safely in Roswell, New Mexico, USA on 14th October 2012. As usual the best way to show this is via the medium of a feel-good montage!

Other ISPs also claim to have experienced a similar traffic surge but we don’t have any specific statistics for them, yet.