The death of Osama bin Laden broke Twitter records, with “the highest sustained rate of tweets ever”, according to the micro-blogging service.
For more than an hour there were over 3,000 tweets per second about bin Laden, peaking at 5,106 tweets per second as President Obama addressed Americans.
On the night of his death, from 10:45 – 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second.
However, despite the intensity of Twitter activity the number of tweets per second did not break the record set in Japan on New Year’s Eve 2010, which saw almost 7,000 tweets per second at its peak.
The number of tweets per second was also higher on the day of the Japan earthquake and tsunami.
The story itself was broken on Twitter by Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld. He said a “reputable person” had told him that bin Laden had been killed, adding “hot damn”.
Sohaib Athar, a 33-year-old computer programmer, unknowingly reported on the bin Laden raid as it unfolded, telling his Twitter followers of an explosion.
Athar, who completed an MBA at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, in 1998, wrote: “A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope it’s not the start of something nasty.”
As news broke of the raid on bin Laden’s hiding place, Athar realised what it was he had been covering. “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it,” he tweeted.
There are now more than 60,000 people following Athar’s Twitter account.
