Highest tweets ever — Bin Laden’s death shakes up the internet

The news of Osama Bin Laden’s death has, not surprisingly, caused a major spike in internet traffic. The news of a successful mission to eliminate the most wanted man in the world sent users flooding the web for information and confirmation.

Akamai’s Net Usage Index, a company which measures traffic for news sites that Akamai delivers content, recorded 4.1 million page views around 11:30pm (US Time) Sunday, when President Obama began his speech.

Around the same time Twitter announced via a tweet that, “Last night saw the highest sustained rate of tweets ever. From 10:45 – 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3 000 tweets per second.” 3 000 tweets per second equates to just about 27.9-million tweets in just two hours and 35 minutes.

The microblogging site goes on to state that at its peak, between 10:45pm and 12:30am, Bin Laden’s demise averaged 3 440 tweets per second. Delivering an average of 12.3-million tweets per hour.

Twitter released a graph showing activity as the news unfolded.

Akamai only measuring news sites shows traffic to have peaked at just over four million page views less than that of last week’s Royal Wedding which peaked at 5.3-million. The online activity around Bin Laden’s death did however cripple CNN’s mobile site.

Here is a graphical representation of the spike