SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter on Friday said that people fired off tens of millions of messages about superstorm Sandy, turning to smartphones to share and get news.
There were "well over" 20 million storm-related Tweets between October 27 and Thursday, according to the globally popular one-to-many text messaging service.
Twitter described the estimate as conservative since it only tracked messages tagged with the words "sandy" or "hurricane."
The number of times people in New York City loaded home page timelines from mobile devices peaked Monday night about the time of a utility company explosion and ensuing widespread power outage.
Mentions of "donate" and "Red Cross" in Tweets surged, along with searches for messages related to Sandy, according to Twitter.
"Increasingly, Twitter has become one of the places people find critical information when they need it during moments of crisis like natural disasters," the San Francisco-based company said.
Superstorm Sandy's US victims on Friday struggled to adjust to gas lines, power outages and temporary housing while the death toll from the monster cyclone approached 100.
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