Twitter user broke Whitney Houston death news 27 minutes before mainstream media

Washington: American diva Whitney Houston’s death was reported by a Twitter user nearly 27 minutes before mainstream media broke the news. The first tweet to reveal the news was sent at 4:30 p.m. local time, by @ajadiornavy, and was only retweeted once.

“Omgg , my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in the tub . such a shame & sad :-(,” the user tweeted. A tweet, sent at 4:57 p.m. local time from the media that confirmed Houston’s death by citing her publicist was retweeted over 10,000 times, according to data from Topsy Labs. According to a website, the news of Houston’s death peaked at 5:23 p.m. with 61,227 tweets in that minute. This isn’t the first time news of a large-scale death announcement was first reported on Twitter. A computer programmer in Pakistan inadvertently live-tweeted the military raid on the Osama bin Laden compound. ANI