A good account is With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective [1], published in CACM a few months after the event. Notice it was the worm.

I was an intern at IBM in '88 and they shut-down the (iirc) two internet getaways to their corporate network (vnet) while people figured out what was going on. News moved slowly back then, and the idea of self-replicating software was unusual. Although IBM had had its own replicator the previous year [2].

[1] https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gskc/security/rochlis89microsco...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Tree_EXEC