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In case there are people here who are really to young to remember this, consider the context:

Although 2001 doesn't seem too long ago, most people didn't have cell phones still, and those that did were signor feature phones.

Social media didn't really exist yet, at least not as we understand it today.

Many people had internet speeds that would be unusable today, so most information still came through the TV.

At the risk of making some people feel old, to me (as a 25 y/old), 2001 feels very long ago, and conjures memories of cassettes and big CRTs.

It's one of my few memories from that far back, actually. The television news, I remember seeing the attacks. Mom was folding laundry, I recall. I wonder sometimes if it's a "fictitious memory", but I think it's real.

Interesting how inverted things are, not even my parents watch TV much anymore, now the normal is getting notifications from whatever social media app.

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.

> In case there are people here who are really to young to remember this

I'd guess there's quite a few of them here. Most current college age kids hadn't been born yet. College seniors were newborns. Those under age 30 probably remember it, but they were most likely too young to really understand what was going on at the time.

I don't recall personal social media then (Myspace was 2003) - but there were large global talk boards with tens of thousands of users:

https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/28/... (closure notice)

Probably due to load, most of the big news sites wouldn't load. I ended up going to BBC.com to find out how bad it was. I heard about it from a very confused DJ on a radio station on my way to work.
Most households in the U.S. already had mobile phones by 2001. Market penetration was even higher in Europe. You're right about the smartphone thing, since they didn't really exist until 2002. In 2001 BlackBerry, the most popular smart-thing with its own mobile radio but no phone, had fewer than 200k subscribers world-wide.
I was 15, everyone at school (in the uk) had phones. I remember waiting to be collected from school and reading the latest updates from the BBC WAP website on my Trium Mars phone - that’s a technology that’s long dead.
AOL Instant Messenger was how I was able to contact a friend in NY at the time.
This submission actually unlocked a memory: I wasn't a regular Fark user but because social media and live blogs on news sites weren't a thing yet and TV coverage was lagging behind, I actually followed the Fark thread because it was the closest thing you'd get to a live updated news feed.

The more recent equivalent would be following Twitter hashtags during terrorist attacks (until they became unusable with people actively spreading disinformation).

I remember being told by a friend of my now-ex-wife that "hundreds" of planes had been "taken over" and would be crashed into state legislatures across the USA. It's very difficult to keep a cool head during an overwhelming crisis, and the world trade centre attack drives home how easy it is to get lost in rumour and fantasy.

That time period following the attacks was surreal. People were very scared of any plane noises, and a brown-skinned terrorist was imagined lurking around every corner. Then the anthrax attacks happened, and the DC sniper attacks too. It felt like the USA was paralyzed by fear, so I can at least appreciate the atmosphere that led to the "patriot" act and other rights-eroding laws.

COVID-19 felt like a natural disaster to me, with effects that are bad but not from malicious intent (ignoring the actions of various groups, I mean). The WTC attack and subsequent terrorism felt different, as they were caused by humans to inflict fear and chaos on us. It's amazing to me how different those 2 events felt.

I lived in a small town of less than 20,000 and two days after the attacks, a rock slide fell onto one of our buildings in the city. I remember many freaking out that we were under attack. It's hard for many people to realize how spooked everyone was when such an unprecedented attack took place. No one felt safe for weeks after.
> It's amazing to me how different those 2 events felt.

Their ISO 9000 works - they're improving. :)

That wasn't anywhere near my experience, are you sure you're not just a generally anxious person or live around those who are?
> Someone is going to get nuked.

Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage.

This website is quite interesting with footage from major tv networks on the day:

https://911realtime.org/

> Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage.

Are you including the ensuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq?

Even then, I think you're seriously underestimating the number of casualties a relatively low yield nuke (in the context of modern strategic weapons) would produce if it hit a city like New York.

I found out about the first plane hitting when my mother called me at work, on a land line I believe, just after I arrived. I fresh out of my BS and worked as a software developer at CMU at the time.

I went into my boss’s office and told him, and I remember he thought it was a small plane. We had a test server room near our office that had a TV and original XBox. A few of us went into the server room to watch the coverage. Soon after, the second plane hit. I remember asking one of our senior managers if this was bigger than Pearl Harbor. He just looked at me dumbfounded. A while later the towers fell.

I had a friend who lived in NYC and commuted to Jersey City via the PATH train, so I called him to make sure he was okay. He was. At the time, I didn’t understand that the towers had completely collapsed; I thought they were half standing. My friend from NYC told me I was wrong—-“they’re gone man.”

We continued watching the coverage together for a couple of hours until the University announced that it was closing for the day (I think it closed the rest of the week, but can’t remember). Then we all just shambled home, stunned.

I remember being surprised and a little heartened that the US waited a month the strike back at Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the time we invaded Iraq, I was no longer heartened, but completely disillusioned about the USA as a force for “good” in the world.

At the time I worked for an ISP which was the primary ISP for most of the major media companies and for the largest consumer internet provider. It was a crazy day trying to keep things flowing under the demand. A lot of traffic engineering and rapidly bringing up additional bandwidth.

All this was done without access to the internet ourselves because early in the day my employer decided to pull the plug on our access. When they pulled the plug many employees went to the cafeteria to watch the TVs there. The company sent security guards to turn off the TVs and confiscate the remotes.

I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now. Then someone says that they will probably attack some wrong country. Prophetic.
As someon who was a child at the time, I remember September 11th in the context of fear and the sense of unity it created shortly thereafter. It's interesting to me to go back and look at the way adults reacted, which was mostly anger. It's surprising how calmly the US government reacted compared to normal people. When Afghanistan refused to extradite Bin Laden most of the people I knew wanted to start nuking Afghan cities one by one until they changed their mind.
The fact that the CNN link still works is really impressive.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_15370...

The SomethingAwful 9/11 thread is also pretty wild: http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/

In case you don't wanna have to keep clicking back/forth to go to the next page (the links aren't adjusted to point to the archived pages) there's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w

I think a big part of “growing up” is realizing that we’re (the US) not the good guys.

9/11 also happens to be the anniversary of the coup in Chile which was instigated by the CIA.

None tops the all time greatest online response – "WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR"
it's crazy to think that until the 2nd plane hit, everyone was thinking about _just_ a bad tragedy, and then came the 2nd explosion and the world changed completely.
This looks like an edited thread. I remember on IRC it was nothing but towel wrapping/turbin winder / sand nggr / islam insults after the second one hit.
What I find interesting is the random comment in the second page that just says "Osama". Did we know that early? I can't remember.
The only site I remember checking at the time was cnn.com, and it was in some kind of super-low bandwidth mode and was minimal static content.
Oh, it's that day of the year. Never forget..that first responders got fucked.
One of my friends and colleagues had just finished a large, years-long IT consulting project with Marsh. Not long after the towers fell he received a request to join a group of people who had worked closely with some of their IT staff killed in the attack. The task: come up with a dictionary of possible passwords the deceased may have used based on everyone's recollection of their private lives and habits around passwords they may have shared (character substitution habits, etc.)

It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.

I found out while on a plane that had just left Hawaii headed for Sydney. I couldn't understand why the flight attendants were walking around with manifests, then talking at length with select passengers. Turns out they had identified those traveling through NYC and wanted to ID those with family there. In the airport 10 hours later saw what I thought were incredibly bad-taste tabloid newspapers headlines. Add in jet lag and it was probably 2 days before I understood what had happened.
The 9/11 text pager data archive is similarly interesting: https://911.wikileaks.org/
So on that day, I was homeless and I woke up on a park bench with the dawn. I went to Mass in the morning where they had the custom of allowing anyone pray for any intention, and so someone mentioned an explosion or bombing in NYC and I didn't think much of it, considering the backdrop of regular terrorist bombings and such.

Then I made my way up to the library and logged onto a public computer in the lab. There was a volunteer at the front desk making many phone calls in an attempt to organize an emergency blood drive, which I thought was notable, but by this time (late morning in Arizona) I didn't really grasp the magnitude of what was going on, until I logged on to a news site or a chat room with my friends and then it all became clear. That afternoon I went to the student lounge at church where the TV was just nonstop replaying footage of the aircraft smashing into buildings. That continuous replay was profoundly traumatic for me and doubtless other people; I do not know why we persisted in viewing it.

Also worth remembering that 9/11 was the 2nd attempt by terrorists to bring down the towers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
I woke up the next day (I'm in Australia) and saw the footage. I remember listening to Sydney's Triple M radio network and callers were being comforted by Andrew Denton and Amanda Keller. Blue color workers were crying on the line. One of the worst days I've experienced.
I remember that day very vividly, I was going to court against my father that day. Waiting to get called into the court room for the start of the day when suddenly a bunch of police pop up and say "Everyone must evacuate the building immediately, court is dismissed for the day."

Get in the car, turn on the radio, and right about then news of the second plane dropped. I knew that was going to be a change across the country right then and there.

Never actually got back to that court case. I think literally every case got an emergency dismissal outright due to that event, as neither myself nor my father ever walked back into the courtroom after that event.

PHP sites never die.
Slashdot.org thread Sep 11 2001: https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towe...
It's amazing that by 9:24am the general public had been told that Bin Laden planned this... with no evidence, and yet, here we are.

Court of public opinion is deadly.

We also managed to make the very idea of conspiracies, false flags and non-government approved opinions... "sketchy"

So cool.

Where were you when Barnacle Jim (phub) screamed "watch bush start a fucking war"
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.. "

Fark was pretty popular at that point as I recall, but I had no idea they were livethreading this at the time, so this is a neat discovery for me, although I'm already shuddering (I lived near NYC at the time)
A really interesting thread - thanks for sharing
I remember the somethingawful.com thread with the iconic post

"Watch Bush start a fucking war"

I remember not being able to reach disinfo.com. I remember some arabic satellite channels being used as a covert channel for transmitting informations probably to terrorists (one of them had the logo blinking in a pattern that looked like morse). I remember strange people at airports asking you if you can please take a letter with you to your destination where someone would collect it.
Veni. Vidi. Venti.
> At least the terrorists dont seem to know too much about physics. Had they hit the buildings down lower to the ground, they could have structurally weakened them to the point where they wouldnt be able to bear the weight of the rest of the building. So far both buildings seem to be holding up.

Probably one of the comments that aged the worse in the entire internet