The Billboard Music Awards has confirmed that BTS' ARMY fandom has caused its servers to crash on the first day of voting for the Top Social Artist category for the awards. On the opening day of the votes, ARMY, the official BTS fandom came in full force and accumulated a record number of 20 million votes in the first 18 hours alone.
It can be recalled that Korea Portal earlier reported that the BTS ARMY managed to make the BTS hashtag the #1 trending topic when the Billboard Music Awards opened the voting its Top Social Artist Category. BTS is the only K-pop group to be nominated for this year's BMAs and they are pitted against music heavyweights like Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande and Shawn Mendez.
On the first day of voting ARMYs trended the BTS hashtag with 8 million votes, proving that they are just as strong a fandom as Bieber's Beliebers, Grande's Arianators, Gomez's Selenators and Mendez's Mendez Army. But more than trending the hashtag, it was the official Billboard Music Awards twitter account that confirmed that some of the BBMA servers broke down because of the influx of votes.
"BTS accumulated a record-breaking 20,000,000 votes for 'Top Social Artist' in under 18 hours since voting opened," the Billboard Music Awards has announced on Twitter. It has not, however, announced the boys' standing in Top Social Artist overall results.
Breaking records is in fact, nothing new for the BTS ARMY which has proven its dedication to BTS' success time and time again. From constantly streaming BTS' MVs on youtube to reach record numbers in the shortest period of time, to keeping the boys on top of the charts, to achieving kill-all status, selling out major arenas around the globe, and even developing video games inspired by BTS and their music, ARMYs have worked hard to make sure that BTS stays on top of the music scene.
It is expected that BTS will be attending the Billboard Music Awards on May 21 for the formal awards ceremony after Big Hit Entertainment CEO Bang Shi Hyuk said to Soompi that he would like for the boys to attend the BMAs should they receive an invite. It was recently reported that BMA event president Mike Mahan personally sent out the invite to BTS.
