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Comment by I_am_tiberius | Hacker News Reader

Do I understand correctly that Europeans weren't able to access most US websites?

"OK, you guys are now my sole source for info on this - all European traffic goes through mae east and now I can't get squat out of the US.. "

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A lot of websites went down under the extreme load of everyone clicking “refresh” over and over.

I was at the office and people would call out when they got a news site to load. I clearly recall that cnn.com went to being text-only.

I was in Europe, and I knew it was middle of the night in Australia, the Australian news websites were loading, it was a static picture of the 2 towers with smoke billowing out of them...

Ironically, my strongest memory of 9/11 (from the UK) was watching the BBC and relaying blow-by-blow, over IRC, to friends in the US who were already in the office.

It wasn't a connectivity issue from my memory, it was most major news sites being completely flattened.

Bear in mind that all news channels were broadcasting constantly at least - would still be pretty rare at the time to find a household without a single TV.

Everything was DDOSed and nothing was really built to scale in those days besides the big guys like google.

This doesn’t match my memory. I was in the UK, at work, and I don’t remember any connectivity issues at all

News sites maybe? I remember spending most of that day online.

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