Gone are the times when people waited for a news bulletin on TV or the morning newspaper the next day to know about an important event. With mobile phones with internet connectivity in almost everyone’s hands, major incidents, or even minor ones, are these days almost always live-reported by social media users.
The following tweet about the US raid on the Abbottabad compound housing Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011 is the most celebrated example of such social media reporting.
Shoaib Akhtar, an IT professional working late at night in Abbottabad, heard the sound of helicopters and shared this information on X, then Twitter, barely knowing what he was talking about. Later, when the Operation Neptune Spear by US Navy SEAL Team Six killing the Al Qaeda leader became known worldwide, his tweet also received global attention as the first public user-generated information about the raid.
India launched Operation Sindoor in the early hours of May 7, 2025, targeting nine terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. At 1:44 am on that day, the Union government’s Press Information Bureau issued a statement informing the public of the same. later in the day, the Indian Armed Forces held a press conference in which Colonel Sophia Qureshi mentioned the exact timing of the operation. It took place between 1:05 am and 1:30 am.
Armed with this information, and using specific keywords and time filters we tried to find out who first tweeted and in a sense reported about Operation Sindoor.
Use of the Epoch Time Filter
Usually, Twitter advanced search only has a date filter, in which tweets between two particular days, or months or years can be searched. But to look for tweets between two different times on the same day, epoch time filter is useful. In simple language, epoch time is a single numerical format to represent any year, month, day and time. To filter tweets based on the time of the event, we have to convert the date and time of Operation Sindoor to epoch time.
For example, Operation Sindoor occurred on May 7, 2025 between 1:05 am and 1:30 am. The epoch time for this date and time can be calculated using various online epoch converters. We are using a website called vk2zay.net .
With the help of this tool, we found the epoch time of 1:05 am and 1:30 am on May 7, 2025.
The epoch time of 1:05 am on 7 May 2025 is 1746560100, while the epoch time of 1:30 am on 7 May 2025 is 1746561600.
Advanced Search
To search different keywords in a single search, they are separated by ‘OR’, while to search tweets between two moments, one has to use ‘SINCE:’ and ‘UNTIL:’ filters. In this case, our advanced search terms were: Fighter jet OR aircraft OR blast OR explosion OR Pakistan OR loud OR sound since:1746560100 until:1746561600
On searching these keywords with time filter, we found many tweets by Pakistani users which mentioned explosions and fighter jets flying.
The oldest tweet among all these was by a user named Tahreem (X handle: @Fedfacforever), who tweeted at 1:09 am and mentioned spotting a fighter jet.
The same user went on to share more tweets on the same topic. One minute later, at 1.10 am, the user wrote, “There was light!!! This was a fighter jet Oh God People are sleeping what the hell!!! More tweets followed. At 1.14 am, they wrote, “This was a fighter jet! I can’t decide if it was Thunder or F-16”.
Readers should note that both JF-17 Thunder and F-16 are combat aircraft used by Pakistan Air Force.
To sum up, according to our findings, the 1.09am IST tweet by Pakistani X user Tehreem (@Fedfanforever) could be the first public mention of Operation Sindoor, (not by that name though). The airstrikes were thus reported on social media at least 35 minutes before the Indian government informed the public about the operation.
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