News of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's death on Sunday night sent Internet traffic soaring.

Twitter reported that, at the peak of the online conversation, its users were posting 5,106 bin Laden-related tweets per second, just short of a new record.

Google Trends ranked the key words "Osama bin Laden's death" as "volcanic", the highest rating it gives to hot topics.

And news sites supported by Akamai, an American content distributor, were registering around 4.1 million views per second.