The death of Osama Bin Laden created huge levels of internet traffic

"As news of Osama bin Laden's death made its way across the globe Sunday night, Internet traffic exploded.
Twitter: At the news event's peak, Twitter said that users were sending off 5,106 tweets per second. That makes the volume of tweets surrounding the event the second-highest in Twitter's history.
It also represented the highest sustained rate of tweets per second in the company's history -- from 10:45 p.m. ET on Sunday through 2:20 a.m. on Monday, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second
The 5,106-peak tweet-per-second peak was still far short of the 6,939 tweets per second record set when Japan brought in the 2011 new year.
[...]
News sites: The bin Laden story resulted in a peak of more than 4.1 million page views per second on the news websites supported and tracked by content delivery network Akamai (AKAM). Akamai delivers about 20% of the Internet's content, and it supports popular news sites like nytimes.com, reuters.com, bbc.com and usatoday.com.
The peak occurred at about 11:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, right as President Obama's made his live, televised statement. Just an hour before the news broke, there were roughly 2.5 million page views per second on those pages.
Despite the unusually high volume of traffic, Akamai said it did not rank in the company's top 10 news events for highest page-view peaks.
The largest peak in Internet traffic came at noon on June 24, 2010, when there were simultaneous World Cup qualifying matches as well as the longest-ever Wimbledon match -- all being played at the same time. Those events resulted in a peak of 10.4 million page views per second on the news sites Akamai supports.
Last week's royal wedding ranked sixth on Akamai's list, with nearly 5.4 million page views per second. It was the second-highest non-sports-related Internet event, right behind the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections.
All of the largest peaks in the top 13 were from events that occurred in 2010 or 2011 -- which is unsurprising, since Internet usage continues to rise globally. But ranking at No. 14 is the election of President Obama, which occurred in November 2008.
The biggest Internet spikes tend to overwhelm servers and rendered some websites unresponsive. News of Michael Jackson's death famously brought down Google News, TMZ.com, latimes.com and even AOL Instant Messenger, thanks to high traffic demands."

Source:  CNN, 2nd May 2011
Also - official tweet from Twitter:
"Last night saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 - 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second [1/3]
At 11p.m. ET, there were 5,106 Tweets per second. At 11:45p.m. ET, when Pres. Obama finished his remarks, there were 5,008 TPS [2/3]
Note: The TPS numbers we reported last night were incomplete [3/3]
An even more precise update: Twitter averaged 3440 TPS from 10:45 to 12:30pm ET last night"
& a chart of the Twitter levels on Flickr