James Peeler’s phone blew up with messages as he drove home from church in Texas. Reading a book on her couch in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wendy Schweiger spied something on Facebook. After finishing a late-night swim in the Baltic Sea off Finland, Matti Niiranen clicked on a CNN livestream.

Each learned that President Joe Biden had abandoned his reelection bid minutes after he dropped a statement online without warning on a Sunday.

Eight days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, it marked the second straight July weekend that a seismic American story broke at a time most people weren’t paying attention to the news. Biden’s announcement was a startling example of how fast and how far word spreads in today’s always-connected world.

“It seemed like a third of the nation knew it instantly,” said longtime news executive Bill Wheatley, “and they told another third.”

Wheatley, now retired, had sat down to check his email and absent-mindedly refreshed the CNN.com home site on his computer. If he didn’t learn the news that way, text messages from friends would have alerted him soon after.

At 1:46 p.m. Eastern time, the moment Biden posted his announcement on X, an estimated 215,000 people happened to be logged on to one of 124 major U.S. news websites. Fifteen minutes later, those sites had 893,000 readers, according to Chartbeat. CNN.com and its news app saw its usage quintuple within 20 minutes of the news breaking, the network said.

Television networks broke into regular programming for the story between 1:50 and 2:04 p.m. During the relatively quiet quarter- hour before 2 p.m., a total of 2.69 million people were watching either CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC, the Nielsen company said. The audience on those three networks swelled to 6.84 million between 2 and 4 p.m. Add ABC and CBS, which also had special coverage in those hours, and there were at least 9.27 million following the story on television.

How did everybody get there so quickly? As Wheatley suggested, word of mouth played a big role. To his credit, Peeler didn’t open his text messages until stopping his car, he said.

Many people also have alerts set up on their phone.

“Our phones are constantly chirping at us, and we have them with us all the time,” said Brian Ott, a media and communications professor at Missouri State University and author of “The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage.”

A generation or two earlier, people would have to be watching TV or listening to the radio to hear a special report about momentous news, said Wheatley, a former executive at NBC News. Then people would spread it by telling friends or family. Now with social media, text alerts and websites available at a click, news moves “much, much faster.”

“The next logical question,” he said, “is how accurate is it?”

Video of the Trump rally where shots were fired appeared instantly on television screens. But most initial news reports were extremely cautious, sticking to what was known: Trump was hurried off the stage by Secret Service agents. Blood was visible. There was a noise that sounded like gunshots.

That, in turn, led some to criticize journalists for being too wary, too reluctant to call it an assassination attempt.

The frenzy of initial breaking news requires strong adherence to the facts available at the moment, no matter what becomes clear later.

When Peeler arrived at his destination in Texas and checked on what his friends had texted him about Biden, he called up the websites of local TV network affiliates. In Pennsylvania, Schweiger turned to The Associated Press and The New York Times online.

“I operate under the assumption that news is 24 hours, and that you always have people that can be pressed into service for anything at any time,” Schweiger said.