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It didn't matter if you did have a cellphone, the network was completely overloaded all day, getting a call through was unlikely.

I remember CNN.com being down for the longest time. I didn't have a television or radio so I ended up following along on the BBC website, which didn't crash. Kudos to the engineers behind that one.

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As I recall, bbc.com was built with WebObjects and a heavy layer of static geneation/caching in front of it at that time, and probably served from Solaris or FreeBSD. This seems like the kind of forum where someone would know with certainty however!

Didn't CNN.com switch to a text only mode?

It did. I don’t remember for how long though. But it went text only to keep up with the demand once they had time to make changes.

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