Osama Bin Laden(AP Images)
AP Images
In hindsight, perhaps the order to go get Osama Bin Laden was more about timing that one might think - if you are going to upstage the most anticipated royal wedding since that of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, at least give the happy couple a few days to enjoy their popularity. Predictably the news that Bin Laden was killed during a U.S. commando raid in Pakistan this past Sunday has completely eclipsed the online impact of Prince William and Princess Catherine's matrimony.
Twitter has announced that the terrorist leader's death has caused a massive spike in messages on the service, averaging 3,440 tweets per second (TPS). It peaked at 5,106 TPS - a huge amount of traffic. This is still short of the current record held by Japanese users during New Years Eve, which sits at 6,939 TPS, but while the numbers are still being crunched many have started to conclude that this is the biggest web event yet. In contrast the royal wedding, which itself enjoyed a massive viewership with 5.3 million page views per minute on news sites, failed to crack the top five top spots (but did beat Barack Obama's November 2008 Election, which topped 4.3 million pageviews each minute). The Royal couple did, though, break video streaming records, topping the live stream viewership reached by the FIFA World Cup.
But even when Bin Laden's death does not topple such records, the story was certainly a digital one. Twitter is credited for the first live details of the event - Pakistani users Sohaib Athar and Mohsin Shah were giving constant updates on their Twitter accounts about the raid nearby their homes, not realising that the sound of helicopters and explosions were actually that of the elite team of Navy SEALS raiding Bin Laden's compound. Twitter is also hailed as where the news of Bin Laden's death first broke, though it isn't clear if the tweet came from a television network or a U.S. politician.
The micro-blog site also appeared to have been the main conduit through which the news spread, with many gadget-loving people receiving it via their phones or iPads. It quickly became the place where people made their feelings felt, including celebrities - from Katy Perry saying that "I believe in justice... but don't u think that an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind?" to comedian Bill Maher declaring: "Somali pirates, Gaddafi's son, now bin Laden - do NOT f*** with Obama, he's Gangsta!!"
But even Twitter's speed pales in comparison to online scammers, who quickly used the news of the Al Qaeda leader's death to lure unsuspecting web users into installing dangerous software. Security firms Kaspersky Labs and McAfee both warned that people are using fake Bin Laden pictures and videos to lure users on Facebook and other services to sites where they unknowingly download and install malicious software. While this was expected - similar trends appeared after the Japan and New Zealand earthquakes - experts were caught off-guard by how quickly the scammers mobilised to take advantage of the situation.
"It's not different this time," wrote Kaspersky Lab's Fabio Assolini. "The bad guys were quite fast and started to poison searches results in Google Images." Security experts have urged people to be vigilant, only use trusted sources, make sure they are directed to such a source (and not a site disguised to look like, for example, Facebook or BBC News) and never to hand over trusted details such as personal information of Facebook verification codes.