Osama death rockets through Internet

SAN FRANCISCO—Word of Osama bin Laden’s death rocketed through the Internet in rapid-fire Twitter messages, Facebook updates, and YouTube video clips.

The number of terse text message “tweets” at Twitter topped 4,000 per second while US President Barack Obama announced that the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks was killed in Pakistan.

The barrage of tweets was among the highest message-sending outbursts at Twitter, which handled a record-high number of 6,939 tweets-per-second when New Year’s Eve 2010 arrived in Japan.

Messages tagged with “#osama” and “obl” quickly jumped to the top two spots in a list of the hottest topics at the global microblogging service.

“Twitter is our Times Square on this victory day,” tweeted New York City journalism school professor Jeff Jarvis, who started his Buzz Machine blog online after being close to the World Trade Center when it was destroyed.

Word of Bin Laden’s death was apparently first leaked at Twitter in a public message sent by Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden,” read a tweet sent by Urbahn about an hour before Obama announced the killing. “Hot damn.”

An IT consultant in the Pakistan city of Abbottabad, who tweets under the name “ReallyVirtual,” appeared to have unknowingly delivered a real-time account of the attack that killed Bin Laden.

Sohaib Athar began tweeting messages about 1 a.m. local time complaining about helicopters hovering and then a window-rattling blast.

His series of messages at Twitter told of a helicopter crash, a family dying, and Pakistani military swarming the area.

“I am just a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash,” he said.