I remember on 9/11 that Slashdot was one of the few sites that stayed up available to deliver commentary and speculation. That was impressive for the time.
By 9/11 "being slashdotted" was a well-known phenomenon (that is, websites going down because they drew so much traffic from Slashdot’s large readership at the time). That meant that the site’s own servers had likely been hardened in various ways to deal with heavy traffic.
If I recall - CmdrTaco talked in considerable detail (at the time, on SlashDot) about the rather extreme technical changes that he and his crew performed, on the fly, on 9/11, to keep their site up.
I remember that as well. All the major new sites were unusable because they were so slow and crashy.
Slashdot had pictures and everything. What a wild time.