The day Landon Donovan almost broke the Web

Around the world on Wednesday, network engineers were monitoring traffic across the internet with Akamai's Net Usage Index, a traffic meter that provides real-time statistics on how many visitors are landing on more than 100 major news sites every minute. Right after Landon Donovan's game-winning goal for the US team during extra time against Algeria, Web traffic jumped to 11.2 million visitors a minute, beating even the 2008 US presidential election results.

Of course, Donovan can't take all the credit. Elsewhere in South Africa, England were ending a similarly do-or-die match with Slovenia and all that excitement hitting the Web at once created the traffic spike, which caused Yahoo Sports to crash and Twitter to go offline.

According to Akami, the all-time Web traffic record was set on the first day of the World Cup at 12 million visitors a minute. And this means that as the tournament moves towards its biggest games, we may see the record broken again and again.