Ellen's Oscars selfie becomes biggest tweet ever

Oscars 2014 host Ellen Degeneres crashed social networking site Twitter with the biggest selfie ever.

Degeneres took a selfie with (brace yourself) Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'O, Peter N'yongO and Angelina Jolie.

The chat show host headed into the audience during the ceremony and whipped out her smartphone, passing it to Cooper and beckoning pretty much the entire front row to assemble behind her.

The selfie saw about as much celebrity as you could cram into shot, including 12 Years A Slave actress Lupita N'yongo's opportunistic brother Peter, the only non-actor pictured.

Kevin Spacey arguably stole the pic meanwhile, offering a rather wonderful open-mouthed expression amid all the grins.

Ellen wrote: "If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever."

DeGeneres swiftly posted the picture on Twitter, with it attracting 80,000 retweets in three minutes and more than a million at the time of writing.

She later admitted to the crowd that she'd had an email from Twitter saying the tweet had been retweeted so much, Twitter briefly went offline.

Last year, the most retweeted tweet was a message from Lea Michelle about the death of her boyfriend Cory Monteith. It received 408,000 retweets.

- Independent