Terror and the Web
- The Impact on the Internet of 9/11
September 15th 2001
Terror
and the Web Part 2
- December 2001 >> Terror
and the Web Part 3 - September 2002 >> Terror
and the Web Part 4 - September 2011 >>
Tuesday September 11
2001 will stand as a dark day in the history of the civilized world.
Beyond the horrors of
the destruction in New York and Washington DC, a different story was developing.
This was the first true test of the Web and the rest of the Internet
to deal with a massive global news story.
In technological terms,
the world has moved on since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in
August 1997. Fours years of development of the web have led to a a huge
growth in the number and quality of news sites, plus the availability of
broadband access and streaming video.
So it was quite natural
for many people to turn the the web as their first source of information.
Initially, news sites coped with demand but as the shock waves began to
spread around the world many news sites became overwhelmed.
Some sites faired better
than others. For a long time it has been the case that when the world
wants news on global events, the world turns to
CNN. The CNN website was almost overwhelmed by demands -
technical staff did an emergency redesign of the site just to strip out
all the extraneous information and just to concentrate on the bare facts.
In the UK it was the middle
of the afternoon. One of the first sites to be overwhelmed by traffic was
BBC News. The BBC
site was essentially unavailable for the rest of the day. Other sites that
struggled to cope with demand were
ITN and the Financial Times
. One of the few sites that managed to keep going was
Ananova, the news site of the Press Association (note:
Ananova is now run by the mobile phone operator Orange
- 1/04).
Most news providers have
enormous backup capacity, but often it was the communications capability
of the Internet itself that came under strain. Email messages that would
normally take a few minutes took up to two hours as network capacity was
overwhelmed. Web search engines such as
Google took to caching the pages on their own servers to
try to spread the load.
My own personal experience
was that most people gave up on the Internet and found whatever televisions
and radios they could and just watched and listened in collective shock.
This pattern was repeated around the world as work ground to a halt.
In every chat room, bulletin
board and newsgroup people came together in horror. Every online community
focussed on the events as they unfolded. People said how they were worried
about friends and relatives, while others tried to comfort them. People
spoke of revenge, some tried to make sense of the events and background
of it all. In effect, these virtual communities became real communities sharing
their grief and anxiety.
However, one of the knock-on
effects was that general traffic across the Internet was actually
down sharply. Dynamoo.com's traffic was at only one third of
normal and most other websites and merchants reported similar huge drops.
The reasons are simple - most people who had Internet access were interested
in news, background information and emailing friends and replatives. It
took two whole days for traffic to return to near normal levels.
Many corporate sites too
became grim reading. Financial firm
Morgan Stanley had 3700 people who worked in the twin towers.
I close with this sombre
text from the Morgan Stanley web site:
The shocking
events of this week at the World Trade Center have not posed a financial
problem for Morgan Stanley but a deeply human one. What dominates our concerns
are those people who may not have escaped the explosion and fires as
the twin towers collapsed.
We can report that
we have been in touch with most of the people who worked for us at the
World Trade Center complex. But a number are still unaccounted for, and
it is clear that we have lost friends and colleagues. Our thoughts and prayers
are with the families and friends of those who died or are still missing,
and these people remain the immediate focus of the Firm.
Terror
and the Web Part 2
- December 2001 >> Terror
and the Web Part 3 - September 2002 >> Terror
and the Web Part 4 - September 2011 >>
Further links:
CNN:
Internet proves vital communications tool
BBC:
UK surfers swamp news sites
Open Directory:
2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon Attack
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