Twitter user broke Houston's death news 27 minutes before media

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 pm 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 pm 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 Mashable, the news of Houston's death peaked at 5:23 pm 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.