According to the website Flightradar24, the flight carrying the Queen’s coffin to London was the most tracked in history, with almost six million people trying to follow the route of the aircraft from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt within the first minute of the flight.
The company stated that more than 4.79 million people watched on its website and app, and 296,000 watched a YouTube stream. The previous record of 2.2 million people who watched U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi fly to Taiwan last month was quickly surpassed.
Flightradar24 said it had taken steps to make its platform as stable as possible before the plane took off, but still encountered problems because too many users were on the platform at the same time.
“Based on our experience last month, we expected a large influx of users, but this immediate, massive spike exceeded our expectations,” it said. According to the company, about 600,000 users were able to “successfully follow the flight before performance degraded.”
“Even though our platform suffered under such heavy load. Queen Elizabeth II’s final flight from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt is by far the all-time most tracked flight on Flightradar24 and will likely remain at the top for a long time,” the company said.
The sources for this piece include an article in BBC.