Inadvertently, 33-year-old IT consultant Sohaib Athar ( @ReallyVirtual ) reported on one of the most important moments in US military history. He tweeted that a helicopter was hovering over the village of Abbottabad, a rare event. A moment later, he recounted how a huge bang shattered the peace. Hopefully, it wasn't the beginning of something terrible.
While President Barack Obama and a small group of insiders followed the attack on Osama Bin Laden live in the Situation Room , @ReallyVirtual was the only other 'eyewitness'. His tweets quickly became world news. The first 'official' statement peru phone number list about the death of Osama Bin Laden also came via Twitter. Keith Urban, former Chief of Staff of Donald Rumsfeld's former Secretary of Defense, tweeted that he had heard from a reliable source that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.
President Obama announced the news himself on national television. In the meantime, the news had exploded on Twitter. At its peak, 5,106 tweets per second (TPS) were sent. Slightly less than the record set on New Year's Eve 2010, when 6,939 TPS were sent.