In a dramatic tweet-by-tweet account, Sohaib Athar and Mohsin Shah gave their Twitter followers live coverage of the middle-of-the-night raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, illustrating the rising importance  — and limits — of online social networks.

Athar and Shah began sending out tweets shortly before 1 a.m. in Pakistan, documenting abnormal helicopter flybys, a copter crash, and then an explosion.

“Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM,” wrote Athar, whose Twitter biography says he lives in Abbottabad, the Pakistani city where the raid occurred.

Their tweets came ahead of the news of Bin Laden’s death, which produced the highest sustained rate of tweets in Twitter’s history, with an average of 5,000 messages per second during President Obama’s announcement of Bin Laden’s death.

One of Athar’s last tweets Monday: “Bin Laden is dead. I didn’t kill him. Please let me sleep now.”