This might seem strange to some younger readers, but remember in 01-02 internet video (and, indeed, internet faster than dial-up) was not ubiquitous. My family has a VHS tape recording of the news that day because that was how the average person preserved TV broadcasts.
And even if you used internet video (or, heck, even read news online), none of the sources (origins sites and Google and other portals) had the capacity to deal well with the major surge of associated with a event like 9/11. Everything online was spotty or broken under load. 9/11 broke the internet before “breaking the internet” was a thing, and more literally than almost anything since.
i have a memory of trying to find out what was really happening sitting in one of my college's library's after an early morning class and trying to get anything to even respond, much less load. for some reason i remember 'relief' when i finally saw the CNN logo.
Fark and Metafilter held up, but they were text to begin with.
Internet video was interesting that day. Couldn't get any from the major sites because they were hammered. But I remember links would get passed along to some Quicktime clips on personal sites. No cell phone cameras, but small camcorders + Macs with firewire were popular enough that personal footage appeared quickly.
Edit: the metafilter thread gives a horrific moment-by-moment update stream if that's something you want to read: https://www.metafilter.com/10034/Plane-crashes-in-to-the-wor...
"This is going to be a big turning point in the history and character of this country, I think." posted by Doug at 6:51 AM on September 11, 2001
Doug was more right than he could have known.
Of course that brought about a whole lot of other consequences.
For those too young to know, being slashdotted was a term for your website going offline due to too much traffic, named for (and primarily used on) the site slashdot.com. Slashdot was the preeminent popular tech/nerd discussion forum of the time, and being linked from a story on slashdot would often direct more attention to your server than it could handle.
A current term for the same thing is the “HN hug of death”, as HN can drive the kind of effect slashdot used to (in part because it has become the new center of gravity for some of the kinds of discussions that used to drive traffic from Slashdot.)
TiVo was also pretty common, but as I recall I just watched on our TV.
Using the Internet for video in 2001 wasn't something anyone would even momentarily consider as realistic.
But I watched the episode on DVD in 2006, when everyone had one, and so it aged like milk.
[1] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Here_Comes_the_Neighborhoo...