Osama Bin Laden Death Causes Internet Traffic Spike, But No Record

The announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death last night, which peaked at 4,118,000 page views per minute during President Obama's statement on television, pushed traffic up by 24 percent globally, but wasn't enough to break the top 15 news events according to new numbers from Akamai.

The company's Net Usage Index for News shows near real-time results for the global news traffic, and the breakdown of the top 14 reveals soccer's dominance with only a single non-soccer event -- the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections -- breaking into the top 5. Last week's royal wedding came in at 6th, with 5,398,731 peak page views per minute, and the all-time record was on June 24th with over 10 million page views per minute. On that day, Multiple World Cup qualifying matches were simultaneously being played during the longest-ever Wimbledon tennis match (between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut).

While last night's events didn't chart in the top 10 with Akamai, they did take down CNN's mobile site and push Twitter to record heights with over 3,000 tweets per second. CNN Money reports that this is the longest sustained tweet rate the company has ever seen.

Below, check out the traffic spike over the past 24 hours and the top 14 news events as rated by Akamai.

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Comments

[Kanzi]

12:58 AM on 05/04/2011

I like how Egypt's revolution news beats the irrelevant OBL

[MIKEinNYC]

09:35 PM on 05/03/2011

Think they scheduled the announcement for that particular time so as to mess up Trump's show?

[Dukedraven]

08:51 AM on 05/03/2011

It's a sports crazy world.

[maurae7]

08:39 PM on 05/02/2011

I bet this is what kept the young couple from going on a honeymoon.

[John Rybock]

08:29 PM on 05/02/2011

One reason certainly is the fact that this was breaking news, not a planned event. I think another factor is those events had peak moments known ahead of time... the stat is PEAK per minute. The last minute of a football game, if you are following online, you're hitting the refresh button every 3 seconds trying to stay up to date, versus something like this, where there would be a lot of reading and no sense of a ticking clock you're trying to catch.

[J0E1]

05:06 PM on 05/02/2011

which peaked at 4,118,000 page views per minute during President Obama's statement on television

That's the key right there before people freak out about having the wrong priorities.  Those soccer games and the royal wedding were scheduled well ahead of time and during hours most of the world would be awake for.  Obama's speech was at a time when much of the world would be asleep, not to mention, the event wasn't exactly listed in the TV Guide ahead of time...

This is just another meaningless attention grabbing headline on HP meant to grab some extra clicks.

[kintarius]

04:46 PM on 05/02/2011

Priorities...

[J0E1]

04:43 PM on 05/02/2011

That's because the killing of Osama was not scheduled ahead of time and covered for a month straight every day on the news prior.

[AG creative]

06:16 PM on 05/02/2011

You're correct.

[bluelyne]

07:01 PM on 05/02/2011

Also, the news was announced at almost 2330 on the east coast. Most people in eastern and central time zones were asleep getting ready for work on Monday. I live in pacific time so I heard it early but I was at work. You can't compare the 2 events and who cares anyway?