Industry News

Tweeter accidentally live tweets Osama bin Laden’s death

In a surprising display of the power of our ever increasingly connected world, a user of the popular social networking service Twitter posted live updates on what later became clear was the raid resulting in the death of Osama bin Laden. Sohaib Athar, known to his followers as @ReallyVirtual, posted the following tweet at around 1am local time:

Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).

Sohaib continued to post updates on the strange events, completely unaware that he was in fact reporting on the top-secret US military operation to capture Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.

The abbottabad helicopter/UFO was shot down near the Bilal Town area, and there’s report of a flash. People saying it could be a drone.

The most entertaining of his tweets from last night must be this tweet describing his moment of realisation that he had in fact unwittingly live blogged one of the most anticipated military operations in the last decade:

Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.

The startling tweets can be read on his twitter profile, and they clearly show how powerful the medium of social networking is and the startling speed at which information can spread across More >