In a flood of traffic after last Tuesday’s attacks, many popular online news sources — including CNN.com — were nearly impossible to access. In response, Web sites of all stripes published information about the attacks, some even creating mirror sites for news sources like NPR.org so that more people could tune in to the overburdened webcast. While mainstream media Web sites buckled and phone lines jammed, e-mail also helped pick up the slack, in some cases carrying the first news to Americans abroad: An American in Indonesia for whom the only sign that something was amiss was a dramatic drop in the dollar value, for example, was able to get information about the events only via e-mails written by New York eyewitnesses and then forwarded from around the world.
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.