Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I was headed downtown to my startup's office when I heard a radio newscast. I don't even know why I had my radio on as it was a pretty short drive.

I immediately went in and started checking the web. It gave me a little more information. Fifteen minutes later when my developer showed up you couldn't bring up any news site on the web.

Guy from across the hall had a TV and he invited all of us in the building to watch. We watched the TV for around an hour and at that point we all made the decision to call it a day.

Got home and think I watched TV for the next 14 hours or so. After a while there was no new information, they just kept repeating themselves on every news channel. I can remember just feeling numb. It was just so unexpected to see the US attacked.

My father said it was worse than Pearl Harbor. People at that time expected war was coming. Most American's at the time had never even heard of Pearl Harbor, much less Hawaii. This was in our living rooms and it was New York and Washington. Now I measure everything in pre-9-11 and post 9-11 because things changed that dramatically.

A lot of the Web wasn't geared for high load. Information was developing so rapidly that online was really the only effective place to go for information (such as it was -- there was rampant speculation). Many sites rapidly slimmed down their services and offered lightweight versions. A few lighter-weight sites remained up, notably, at the time, Slashdot.

NPR refers to 9/11 as the event which made clear that the network needed to have full capabilities to broadcast from a secondary location, and began planning for its west-coast hub (in Los Angeles) shortly after. Its flagship news programmes are now co-anchored from both Washington and Los Angeles.

This is something that I’ve completely forgotten until now. I remember all the major news sites were down and when they came back up, there were only simple html pages. It took a while before they restored to a slimmed down version. I have a memory of a picture on a news article that I can’t forget: there were tens of ambulances one behind another on a boulevard, waiting in line to help people.

I also remember several cable channels (non-news) entirely shut off programming for a few days after.

Both broadcast transmission and network distribution were severely impacted by loss of the towers, and other disruptions to NYC.

Slashdot was absolutely essential that day, seemingly the only site that was up

Agreed about the essential aspect of Slashdot that day. That was the only way to find detailed thoughts/reactions and just not the headlines.

Slashdot (smaller audience) and Google stayed up. All the major (US) news sites were down.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towe...

Google.com was pretty central as well.

http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2002/wwwdocs/papers/9-11.html

It's funny that you mentioned Slashdot. I was living in Portland (OR) at the time I first saw the news on Slashdot. I turned on the TV to confirm. I don't remember the rest of that day except for being jumpy, as was everyone.

I got the news by radio -- even before hearing what had happened, it was clear by the anchor's voice (Bob Edwards, NPR), that something was very wrong. Similar to the Saturday in 2003 where Scott Simon's voice pressaged the Columbia disaster before I heard the words. (Knowing that the Shuttle was landing that day suggested the issue before hearing that specifically.)

I'd been due to travel to a client site, and called. I'd only heard that a plane had struck the tower, the client added that it was two planes, and the towers were down. "This is war" was my immediate response.

Then I headed to Slashdot to find out WTF was going on, as fighter jets sortied overhead.

Surreal times.

I remember CNN being down for part of the morning, then coming back up with a stripped-down version. This was before CDNs—those servers were sitting in a rack somewhere, probably a few (or few dozen) web servers and a reverse proxy serving requests for the entire world.

I also remember trying to load the WTC website, and it not responding. IIRC, it was hosted in the basement of one of the WTC towers.

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