A record number of people – 5 million – tracked the Royal Air Force flight carrying Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin from Edinburgh to Northolt on Flightradar24.

The website processed more than 76 million requests related to the flight, involving any action by a user, like clicking on the flight icon, clicking on the aircraft information, or adjusting settings.

Flightradar24 said that within the first minute of the aircraft transponder activating, six million people tried to click on the flight carrying the Queen, putting “unprecedented” strain on its platform.

The huge numbers caused disruption on the site, despite traffic calming measures being rolled out to provide stability prior to the flight.

Numbers were far higher than when Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives, travelled to Taiwan last month – which was followed by 2.2 million people.

The all-time flight tracking record saw 4.79 million view the flight on web and mobile app services, while 296,000 watched via a YouTube live stream.

Approximately 600,000 users were able to successfully follow the flight before performance degraded.

"Based on our experience last month, we expected a large influx of users, but this immediate, massive spike was beyond what we had anticipated," said the company.

Share Story: