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10 Pictures That Broke The Internet

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Ten photographs turned Twitter and Instagram into a battlefield, and the internet has never quite recovered.

Before “viral” meant a fifteen-second TikTok, it meant a single still image crashing servers and flooding timelines within minutes. TheThings Celebrity’s countdown, 10 Pictures That Broke The Internet, runs through the photographs that actually did what that phrase promises — from a magazine cover engineered to melt the web to a selfie that briefly took Twitter offline. Each entry comes with a real number attached, and the numbers are what make the list worth revisiting.

• Kim Kardashian’s November 2014 Paper magazine cover, shot by Jean-Paul Goude, pulled in nearly 16 million page views in a single day under the explicit tagline “Break the Internet.”
• Ellen DeGeneres’s group selfie at the 86th Academy Awards in March 2014, snapped by Bradley Cooper, was retweeted more than 3 million times and briefly slowed Twitter down.
• Caitlyn Jenner’s June 2015 Vanity Fair cover hit 1 million Twitter followers in 4 hours and 3 minutes, breaking a Guinness World Record previously held by Barack Obama.

The Cover That Named Its Own Mission

Kim Kardashian’s Paper cover didn’t just go viral by accident — it was built to. Jean-Paul Goude’s oiled-up, champagne-balancing image ran under the cover line “Break the Internet,” and for once the hype lived up to the branding. The magazine’s site reportedly pulled in close to 16 million page views in 24 hours, a number that made the shoot a case study cited across digital media desks for months afterward. It’s the kind of moment that’s followed Kardashian ever since, the same way fans keep circling back to Kim Kardashian’s family life for the next headline.

Ellen’s Selfie and the Record It Set

The Oscars selfie remains the list’s most cited example of a single frame taking down infrastructure. Bradley Cooper physically held the phone while DeGeneres crammed Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper himself, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, Channing Tatum, Jared Leto, Peter Nyong’o Jr. and Angelina Jolie into frame during the March 2014 broadcast. Twitter briefly buckled under the traffic, and the photo topped 3 million retweets, making it the most retweeted image on the platform at that point.

Kim Kardashian’s Paper magazine cover generated nearly 16 million page views in a single day — the exact traffic spike its own headline promised.

Caitlyn Jenner Breaks a Record Held by a President

When Annie Leibovitz’s “Call Me Caitlyn” cover for Vanity Fair hit in June 2015, Caitlyn Jenner’s introduction to the world came with a Twitter account attached. She reached 1 million followers in just 4 hours and 3 minutes, a pace that broke the Guinness World Record for fastest to a million followers — a mark that had belonged to Barack Obama. It’s a milestone that sits alongside other royal and celebrity image moments the internet has fixated on, the way people still comb through royal wedding coverage years after the fact.

Instagram’s Most-Liked Photo of 2015

On Instagram, the crown for 2015 went to Kendall Jenner’s heart-shaped hair portrait, which edged out the previous record holder — her sister Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s 2014 wedding kiss in Florence — to become the platform’s most-liked photo of the year. The list rounds out with a mix of throwback and paparazzi shots: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s 1990s turtleneck-and-fanny-pack photo, paparazzi images of Justin Bieber vacationing in Bora Bora in late 2015, Miley Cyrus twerking at the 2013 VMAs, Taylor Swift introducing her kitten Olivia Benson, and Prince William and Kate Middleton’s 2011 royal wedding.

Kendall Jenner held that Instagram crown for exactly one calendar year before someone else came along to chase the same record — which is really the whole game with these lists. Whatever image is sitting on top when the countdown gets made is basically a placeholder until the next cover, selfie, or paparazzi shot shows up to knock it off.