Whitney Houston Dead: Who First Broke the News?

The news about the death of iconic singer Whitney Houston was first broken through Twitter, at least 43 minutes before the mainstream media picked up the story.

The Associated Press tweeted the news at 4.57pm local time, saying, BREAKING: Publicist Kristen Foster says singer Whitney Houston has died at age 48, which was retweeted 12742 times so far.

After AP confirmed Houston's death, over 2.5 million related tweets were post within an hour.

However, AP was not the first to break the news. The news was first broken at 4.15pm by @ajadiornavy, a relative of a hotel worker who claimed to have found Houston dead in her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Omgg , my aunt Tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in the tub . such ashame & sad :-( (sic), @ajadiornavy tweeted.

Later, at 4.30pm, another Twitter user @Big Chorizo also tweeted about Houston's death on the @chilemasgrande page, which is still 27 minutes earlier than AP's tweet.

My sources say Whitney Houston found dead in Beverly hills hotel.. Not in the news yet!! the tweet read.

Nevertheless, both the tweets didn't catch attention it seems - the first one was retweeted 55 times and the latter was retweeted 37 times. When the AP posted the news, it prompting about 2.5 million tweets and retweets in the first hour.

According to Digital Spy, there were over 1,000 tweets per second at average. In comparison, during the recent Super Bowl, there were much less than 1,000 tweets per second.

Meanwhile, fans are pouring their shock and sadness over Houston's sudden death on Twitter, posting links of over 3,000 video recordings of her songs and performances.

This could be an indication that Twitter holds the real power in the current technology age.