Steve Jobs changed the world with his vision and his innovative devices that made his company Apple a house-hold name.

And after his death on Wednesday the world responded with an online outpouring of grief across various social media platforms that will likely smash records.

An Australian social media monitoring agency said on Thursday that tweets, blog posts and tributes to the late Apple co-founder and visionary overwhelmed web giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook.

The social monitoring agency SR7 estimated that news about Steve Jobs death had hit a record 10,000 tweets per second. Five of the ten topics trending worldwide on Twitter were about the Apple innovator, including two of his catchphrases, "Think Different" and "Stay Hungry".

"It has the potential to pass the all-time social media interactivity level, particularly on the Twitter platform where it will probably be in excess of 10,000 tweets per second," Peter Fraser, co-founder of Australian social media monitoring agency SR7 told AFP.

"We're awaiting the official Twitter data to be released; however, from the numbers that we've been monitoring through the day since the announcement it's certainly been trending to break that record."

The online tweets were so huge that it temporarily caused Twitter to lock-down displaying the infamous "fail whale" to indicate the site was down. The chatter is set to break the 8,868 tweets per second record set by Beyonce pregnancy announcement at the MTV awards. Osama bin Laden's death only saw about 5,000 tweets per second while Michael Jackson's death in 2009 had about 493 tweets per second.

The number of Tweets could be attributed to the numerous celebrities, politicians and other influential figures that posted about Jobs death and passed it on to their thousands of followers.

"What you're seeing across platforms is a remarkable level of interactivity," he said.

"When you look at the kinds of people that are commenting ... it is a plethora of highly influential people around the world, each of whom have enormous followings in their own right, who are really building that momentum."

On Google, eight out of ten of the most searched terms were Steve Jobs related. News sites also experienced slow-downs in their mobile services as people checked for more information, according to an internet and mobile cloud monitoring firm, Keynote.

"While the news sites connected to the internet via high speed fixed line pipes appeared to have been minimally affected, mobile devices have much smaller connections/pipes to the internet," explained Shawn White, Keynote's vice-president of operations, in a statement.