The selfie shows Hollywood stars including (from left) Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, DeGeneres, Kevin Spacey,Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'o and her brother and Angelina Jolie (with her face half obscured). DeGeneres tweeted the picture on herown account and captioned it: "If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars".
It reached 779,295 retweets in approximately half an hour, and so beat a record previously held by the US president, when he tweeted an image titled "Four more years" at the point of his re-election in November 2012.
Within an hour, the DeGeneres tweet had claimed over a million retweets. The Oscars host later said that Twitter had temporarily crashed because of her actions and added: "We really just made history. We're all winners tonight."
Come the end of the ceremony, the figure stood at 2,070,132.
