With the tragic shooting at Oscar Pistorius’s house and President Zuma’s State of the Nation address, Valentine’s Day 2013 was quite likely one of the biggest expected and unexpected news days South Africans will experience this year.

According to Effective Measure’s stats, News24 and mobi site m.news24.com, were the news platforms of choice for over 1.2-million Unique Browsers worldwide. There was an upswing in all mobile apps across Blackberry, iPad and iPhone across 24.com.

A breakdown of News24 stats for South African browsers on the day records 570 000 Unique Web Browsers with 4.2 million Page Views; 385 000 Unique Mobile Browsers with 2.9 million Page Views, and 282 000 active application users clocking 1.2 million sessions.

The top read story of the day – Oscar Pistorius shoots girlfriend - had 502 000 web page views and 213 000 mobile page views.

BREAKING: Oscar Pistorius has apparently shot and killed his girlfriend after mistaking her for a burglar, police have confirmed

The activity on News24’s social media networks also reached record highs. Facebook referrals of the Pistorius story received 70 030 referrals, which is 5 times the daily average.  Their first breaking news tweet from @News24 was retweeted 5 602 times, by far the most RT’s the News24 twitter account has ever had.

— News24 (@News24) February 14, 2013

Says Jannie Momberg, News24’s Editor in Chief says “News24 has built up a reputation over the years in delivering the latest breaking news consistently. The death of Reeva Steenkamp and subsequent arrest of Oscar Pistorius was the biggest South African Internet news event since the popularisation of the Internet in the late 90s. The traffic on all our platforms reached record highs, but we were able – with some slight technical tweaks – to continuously inform our users on a stable platform.”