Gridlock
Sep 12 2001
Do we even have to tell you that phones jammed and Web sites crashed, and that e-mail never looked so good?
"People trapped in buildings in Manhattan in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center are finding that e-mail and instant messaging are the best ways to contact their friends and loved ones," reported Farhad Manjoo of Wired News. If you're wired enough to read this, you probably sent some e-mail to New York yourself on Tuesday.
Media everywhere noted this trend, and many articles quoted hurried messages from eyewitness New Yorkers. "A lot of people don't realize that the Internet was originally created to manage communication in such an instance of attack as this," Earthlink president Michael McQuarty told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Phone lines overloaded. The New York Times interviewed one woman who tried to call her sister in Manhattan about 75 times in five hours. Verizon made its Manhattan pay phones free of charge; lines stretched down the block. Local radio and television stations with transmitters at the World Trade Center were knocked off the air for those without cable TV, said the Times, but "some were able to switch to backup sites, primarily on the Empire State Building."
Major U.S. sites such as CNN stripped out ads, video and other bandwidth-suckers in an attempt to stay accessible. Reuters reports that European news sites also suffered outages. Google.com urged users to log out and watch TV or listen to the radio instead. Wired reported that tech sites such as Slashdot went off-topic to pick up the slack, and Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press said "the Internet failed miserably" in providing information during the crisis.
News.com said "The Web sites of the airlines whose planes were hijacked were also swarmed with traffic," as were the FBI and Pentagon sites. Federal Computer Week reported that for a few hours after the disaster, "virtually all official government Web sites remained silent on the unfolding disaster." We forgive them for having other things on their minds.
In addition to other as-yet-incalculable losses, some lost the false feeling of omniscience that the Internet can provide. On Salon, tech writer Andrew Leonard's father, John, described working at his computer Tuesday morning, unable to get online and check e-mail. "Until the phone rings and my stepdaughter downtown tells me that maybe I should be watching television because it is like the worst sort of TV movie, and I don't know what she's talking about," wrote Leonard. "I will try to fax this to San Francisco and then go back to being wired to the gills and stupider than ever."
Networks Hit, But Telecom Stays Operational
TheStandard.com
Families and Friends Hoping for Reassurance Find Frustration and Anguish
New York Times
A Flood of Anxious Phone Calls Clog Lines, and TV Channels Go Off the Air
New York Times
Fed Web sites silent as New York, Washington burn
USA Today
Net offers lifeline amid tragedy
CNET
Internet Performs Global Role, Supplementing TV
Online Journalism Review
Scrambling for News
ABC News
Web flooded as people seek info on attacks
CNET
News Sites Trim Down To Handle Traffic Load
Newsbytes
Net fails key test during clamor for information
Detroit Free Press
Internet traffic slows, news sites jammed following attacks
SiliconValley.com
Trapped and Chatting in NYC
Wired
Tech Sites Pick up the News
Wired
E-mail indispensable as phone systems jam
AccessAtlanta.com
Chaos Erupts
Salon