Twitter buzzes with news of Bin Laden death

TAMPA - The social media website ‘Twitter’ boasted its most sustained traffic ever Sunday night, as news of Osama bin Laden’s death broke.

Twitter peaked at 5,106 tweets per second Sunday night, and sustained an average rate of 3,440 tweets per second, the company said.

Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, became one of the first people on the website to confirm bin Laden was dead. He did not, however, have any official confirmation; he later said he had heard it from a television producer.

Florida Congressman Dennis Ross was one of the first acting politicians to tweet the news, saying at 10:41 p.m. “Bin Laden is dead. GOD BLESS America.”

An IT consultant in Pakistan named Sohaib Athar, who lives near the compound where bin Laden was housed, 'live-tweeted' the firefight that killed bin Laden. He did not, however, realize at the time the activity he was describing involved bin Laden.

“He was merely tweeting what was going on around him,” said Kelli Burns, a University of South Florida professor who studies social media. “To me, it’s amazing those tweets could go around the world so quickly.”

Burns believes people have turned to websites like Twitter because it allows them to share news quickly with people they know and people around the world.

“We’re sharing news we hear, we’re sharing news with friends, we’re talking about news, we’re reflecting on news and we’re trying to make sense of it through social networks,” Burns said.