Not surprisingly, news of Osama bin Laden's death spread rapidly throughout the Twitterverse Sunday night; the micro-blogging site said Twitter use spiked to 4,000 tweets per second around the time of President Obama's announcement.
A former Bush staffer, meanwhile, denied breaking the story; that honor might go to an unknown IT consultant in Pakistan.
Bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, was killed in a U.S.-led raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Obama appeared on national television shortly before midnight last night to discuss bin Laden's death (video below). He was scheduled to speak around 10:30pm but news channels reported that his appearance was delayed so that the White House could notify appropriate world leaders and members of Congress.
Around 10:30pm, Keith Urbahn, former Bush staffer and current chief of staff for Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted that a "reputable person" told him that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden. Several minutes later, cable news networks started confirming the news. Urbahn, however, was reluctant to accept credit for breaking the story.
"My source was a connected network TV news producer. Stories about 'the death of MSM' because of my 'first' tweet are greatly exaggerated," he tweeted this morning.
"As much as I believe in rise of 'citizen journalism,' blogs, twitter etc supplanting traditional media, my tweet isn't great evidence of it," he also said.
Someone who might have unknowingly tweeted the news, however, is Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant living in Abbottabad. The Wall Street Journal reports that Athar, who tweets @ReallyVirtual, wrote yesterday that he saw a helicopter hovering over the city around 1am, which he said was a "rare event."
"A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S," he tweeted later.
When news broke of bin Laden's death, Athar wrote, "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it."
According to his Twitter feed, he has since been inundated with media requests. He apologized for not being able to answer everyone, but downplayed his involvement.
"I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into facebook. That's all," he wrote about six hours ago.
Facebook, meanwhile, reported on the members of Congress who took to the social-networking site to post their thoughts on bin Laden's death.
The record for tweets per second (TPS) hit 6,939 in Japan on New Year's Eve. The previous high record had been 3,283 TPS, which was set during Japan's victory over Denmark in the World Cup last summer, Twitter said in January.