{"id":415531,"date":"2011-05-02T16:57:04","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T16:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/05\/02\/bin-laden-news-4000-tweets-a-second\/"},"modified":"2011-05-02T16:57:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T16:57:04","slug":"bin-laden-news-4000-tweets-a-second","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/05\/02\/bin-laden-news-4000-tweets-a-second\/","title":{"rendered":"Bin Laden news: 4,000 tweets a second"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"InternetAkamai’s monitoring dashboard for Internet traffic to global news sites recorded a surge as President Obama spoke live from the White House.<\/strong><\/span> By David Goldman<\/a>, staff writer<\/span>May 2, 2011: 12:55 PM ET<\/span><\/p>\n

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — As news of Osama bin Laden’s death made its way across the globe Sunday night, Internet traffic exploded.<\/p>\n

Twitter:<\/strong> At the news event’s peak, Twitter said that users were sending off more than 4,000 tweets per second. That makes the volume of tweets surrounding the event<\/a> either the second or third-highest in Twitter’s history.<\/p>\n

That volume is on par with the 4,064 tweets-per-second peak of this year’s Super Bowl, but still far short of the 6,939 tweets per second record set when Japan brought in the 2011 new year.<\/p>\n

Twitter recently has played an increasingly important role as a disseminator of breaking news<\/a>, and the bin Laden story was another prime example.<\/p>\n

Just before White House officials told the news media that bin Laden had been killed, Keith Urbahn, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff, spread the word<\/a> via Twitter.<\/p>\n

“So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”<\/p>\n

Urbahn later said he was tipped off by a well-connected network TV news producer.<\/p>\n

Other news agencies quickly followed with tweets, and the microblogging site soon exploded with information about the event.<\/p>\n

Urbahn was actually not the first to break the news. A Pakistani IT consultant named Sohaib Athar with the Twitter handle ReallyVirtual<\/a>, who lives in the city of Abbottabad where bin Laden was killed, unwittingly live-tweeted the event<\/a> as it was happening.<\/p>\n

“A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad … I hope its not the start of something nasty” Athar tweeted at about 5:00 p.m. ET on Sunday.<\/p>\n

Google:<\/strong> Google Trends<\/a> ranked the keywords “osama bin laden dead” as “volcanic,” the highest level it assigns for a trending topic.<\/p>\n

Sunday was not the first time that the term “osama bin laden dead” peaked on Google (GOOG<\/a>, Fortune 500<\/a>). On Sept. 24, 2006, a French newspaper l’Est Republicain<\/em> reported a story supposedly based on leaked Saudi intelligence documents that said bin Laden had been killed a month earlier. The CIA and French governments quickly denounced that report as false.<\/p>\n

Google Insights for Search<\/a> ranked that 2006 story as the biggest search event for bin Laden, but the tool has not updated yet with Sunday’s data.<\/p>\n

News sites:<\/strong> The bin Laden story resulted in a peak of more than 4.1 million page views per second on the news websites supported and tracked by content delivery network Akamai (AKAM<\/a>). Akamai delivers about 20% of the Internet’s content, and it supports popular news sites like nytimes.com, reuters.com, bbc.com and usatoday.com.<\/p>\n

The peak occurred at about 11:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, right as President Obama’s news conference began. Just an hour before the news broke, there were roughly 2.5 million page views per second on those pages.<\/p>\n

Despite the unusually high volume of traffic, Akamai said it did not rank in the company’s top 10 news events for highest page-view peaks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The largest peak in Internet traffic came at noon on June 24, 2010, when there were simultaneous World Cup qualifying matches as well as the longest-ever Wimbledon match — all being played at the same time. Those events resulted in a peak of 10.4 million page views per second on the news sites Akamai supports.<\/p>\n

Last week’s royal wedding ranked sixth on Akamai’s list, with more than 5 million page views per second. It was the second-highest non-sports-related Internet event, right behind the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections.<\/p>\n

All of the largest peaks in the top 13 were from events that occurred in 2010 or 2011 — which is unsurprising, since Internet usage continues to rise globally. But ranking at No. 14 is the election of President Obama, which occurred in November 2008.<\/p>\n

The biggest Internet spikes tend to overwhelm servers and rendered some websites unresponsive. News of Michael Jackson’s death<\/a> famously brought down Google News, TMZ.com, latimes.com and even AOL Instant Messenger, thanks to high traffic demands. \u00a0\"To<\/a><\/p>\n

First Published: May 2, 2011: 11:36 AM ET<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more:
\nBin Laden news: 4,000 tweets a second<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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