Bin Laden death sees Twitter traffic soar

Activity on Twitter hit its highest point in the communication site’s five-year history as news emerged of the death of Osama bin Laden on Sunday night.

However, the spike in overall online news consumption fell short of last week’s royal wedding and the football World Cup in South Africa, according to Akamai, which manages internet traffic.

Twitter said that at 11pm eastern time on May 1, shortly before President Barack Obama began his address confirming the events in Pakistan, users’ 140-character posts peaked at 5,106 per second. At 11.45pm, when the president had finished speaking, there were 5,008 tweets per second.

“Last night saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever,” Twitter said, averaging 3,440 per second between 10.45pm and 12.30am. The site has around 200m registered users posting an average of 140m tweets per day, with 70 per cent of its traffic coming from outside the US.

Previous Twitter highs have been seen around major sports events and the Japanese earthquake. This year’s Super Bowl saw a peak of 4,064 tweets per second at the end of the American football match. That beat the previous record achieved during the football World Cup last year, when message volume reached 3,283 per second.

“[The] Super Bowl had a sustained spike during halftime, but it was closer to 15 [minutes],” Twitter said, “and [the] Japan earthquake had bigger spikes for more hours, but not for a significant sustained period.”

The record for the single greatest intensity of tweets still stands at 6,939 per second, at midnight in Japan on January 1, 2011, although the spike did not last for long.

Last week’s royal wedding in London generated around 300 tweets per second as Prince William and Kate Middleton exchanged vows.

But even as Twitter lit up with excitement at news of the terrorist’s killing by US special forces, other online news sources failed to top the previous week’s highs.

According to Akamai, global traffic to news websites spiked at 4.1m page views per minute shortly before midnight eastern time on May 1, compared with 5.4m during live coverage of the royal wedding and 6m on the first day of the 2010 World Cup. Mr Obama’s election victory generated a peak of 4.3m page views per minute, while the 2010 US midterm elections spiked at 5.7m.

The first public indications of the bin Laden attack appeared on Twitter around 10.30pm eastern time, via a combination of professional media, Washington advisers and “citizen journalists” in Abbottabad – around 15 minutes before the news was picked up by TV news networks.

Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant who tweets under the name ReallyVirtual, posted about the “rare event” of a helicopter hovering over Abbottabad at 1am local time and reported a “huge window shaking bang” – but did not at the time realise the significance of the events.

A few hours later, Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff for former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is credited with breaking the news of bin Laden’s death. “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn,” he tweeted.

Within 12 hours of the news breaking, reports of bin Laden’s shooting had appeared on around 40,000 news stories and blog posts, according to Sysomos, which provides tools for monitoring social media, and generated an estimated 2.2m tweets.

However, as news of bin Laden’s death circulated around social networks, inaccuracies and gossip mingled with the official version of events. A photograph purporting to show the face of the dead bin Laden turned out to be a fake dating back to 2009, but not before it had been published by several major newspaper websites.

In the past, Twitter has “also [been] first with deaths of many people who didn’t die”, noted Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s journalism school. Baseless rumours of the untimely demises of celebrities including actors Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford have spread quickly across the network in recent years.