Osama Raid Inadvertently Live Tweeted, First Rumors Surfaced on Twitter as Well

The big news of the moment is the death of the world's most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden. As with any big news story these days, it was a moment for Twitter to shine and the site didn't disappoint this time either.

News of Osama's death actually surfaced on Twitter and was only later picked up by the old media and mainstream news channels. More than a hour later US President Barack Obama confirmed the news.

Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, under the Bush administration, first tweeted of the rumored death of bin Laden, but he was unable to confirm the authenticity of the news.

Official confirmation came 20 minutes later and president Obama spoke one hour and ten minutes after the first tweet.

But the first tweets related to the raid that led to Osama's death came in as the attack unfolded. An IT consultant, Sohaib Athar, living in Abbottabad the city where Osama was found and killed, started tweeting about a helicopter hovering the town and later about an explosion and reports that the helicopter wasn't Pakistani.

Athar didn't know what he was witnessing until hours later, but it's a very interesting indicator of the power of Twitter. Of course, with no context and no outside data, no one would have been able to know what was actually happening during the event, but it's an on-the-ground report which is now recorded for posterity and available to anyone already.

Unsurprisingly, the news is also swelling the site with people retweeting the most interesting reports, commenting or simply cheering on. Twitter has revealed that it saw a spike in activity culminating at 4,000 tweets per second, a huge number, but not the biggest the site has ever saw.

For New Year in Japan Twitter got almost 7,000 tweets, but excluding this, Osama's death would have been a contender for the biggest even on Twitter ever.