Get Updates On MobileNEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- As news of Osama bin Laden's death made its way across the globe Sunday night, Internet traffic exploded.
Twitter: 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 either the second or third-highest in Twitter's history.
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.
Twitter recently has played an increasingly important role as a disseminator of breaking news, and the bin Laden story was another prime example.
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 via Twitter.
"So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn."
Urbahn later said he was tipped off by a well-connected network TV news producer.
Other news agencies quickly followed with tweets, and the microblogging site soon exploded with information about the event.
Urbahn was actually not the first to break the news. A Pakistani IT consultant named Sohaib Athar with the Twitter handle ReallyVirtual, who lives in the city of Abbottabad where bin Laden was killed, unwittingly live-tweeted the event as it was happening.
"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.
Google: Google Trends ranked the keywords "osama bin laden dead" as "volcanic," the highest level it assigns for a trending topic.
Sunday was not the first time that the term "osama bin laden dead" peaked on Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). On Sept. 24, 2006, a French newspaper l'Est Republicain 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.
Twitter: 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 either the second or third-highest in Twitter's history.
Twitter recently has played an increasingly important role as a disseminator of breaking news, and the bin Laden story was another prime example.
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 via Twitter.
"So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn."
Urbahn later said he was tipped off by a well-connected network TV news producer.
Other news agencies quickly followed with tweets, and the microblogging site soon exploded with information about the event.
Urbahn was actually not the first to break the news. A Pakistani IT consultant named Sohaib Athar with the Twitter handle ReallyVirtual, who lives in the city of Abbottabad where bin Laden was killed, unwittingly live-tweeted the event as it was happening.
"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.
Google: Google Trends ranked the keywords "osama bin laden dead" as "volcanic," the highest level it assigns for a trending topic.
Sunday was not the first time that the term "osama bin laden dead" peaked on Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). On Sept. 24, 2006, a French newspaper l'Est Republicain 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.
