The world is turning to the internet for news more than ever with the riots in the UK, especially Twitter.

According to website Hitwise the riots of the last few days have led to sudden spikes in websites such as Twitter, the BBC and Sky News.

While the BBC and Sky had the public spending prolonged amount of time watching live updates and news, it was Twitter that saw the greatest increase in internet traffic.

Hitwise has reported that:

"Twitter accounted for 1 in every 170 UK Internet visits yesterday, by our estimations there were over 3.4m visits to the Twitter homepage from the UK population alone.

"Twitter received 15 per cent more visits yesterday than it did around the super-injunctions scandal, the previous biggest spike in its UK history."

The increase in traffic for Twitter was the direct result of rioters trying to organise looting as well as members of the public looking for more specific local news as opposed to what was reported on the national news sites.

The microblogging site was also used by the public to report members trying to incite trouble to the police and sending updates to inform the police where riots might occur.

This increase in traffic has meant that this has put Twitter ahead of Facebook when it came to people using social networking sites for news.

According to Hitwise, the most prolific tweeters were Londoners who also used the social media platform to organise clean ups in the capital.