It’s not everyday that a single news event makes the homepage of every single news site across the globe at the same time. But the U.S. election results did just that. Many news sites experienced record-breaking numbers including CNN.com which served 276 million pageviews to 27 million unique visitors on Tuesday. Akamai, the content delivery network for most of the top news sites, reported a peak of 8,572,042 visitors per minute around 11pm last night. Hitwise compiled the traffic stats for the top 24 news sites from yesterday.

Shortly after Barack Obama was declared the projected winner, I started taking full-page screenshots of the homepages from as many news sites that I could think of. I did this to partly study the designs and partly to preserve the historic night. You can download the complete collection of screengrabs in a complete 50MB zip.

Below is a collage of screenshots of the homepages from 24 major news outlets just after Barack Obama was announced as the winner. Clicking the picture links to a bigger version on Flickr.