alt Hacker NewsI was at my desk here at work (yes, believe it or not, I still work at the same place I did 25 years ago) and as soon as it happened, all the major newspaper websites got overwhelmed and became unreachable. I ended up getting news from the Times of India's website because it was keeping up with the story but wasn't getting hit as hard as the others.
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I remember trying to reach CNN.com on a school library computer. Eventually CNN put up a lightweight version that scaled better.
Same! I remember a co-worker getting a call from a relative about it so I went to cnn.com. ...only to see it time out. Same with usatoday.com and abcnews.com. At that point I knew that something was happening.
I then happened to remember that abcnews.com.au existed and figured Australia's websites weren't getting hit quite as hard as ours, and I was right. It was front page news there.
We all left the office (which was in Center City Philadelphia) a few minutes later.
I recall slashdot briefly becoming more like a scalable citizen journalist site in the middle of its usual news aggregation and performative memes.
Same, Drudge Report was one of the only sites that actually loaded consistently for me that morning. I think BBC may have held up a bit better than US news sites too. I remember the first stories trickling in thought it was like a Cessna or something else small that hit, and by the time TV was live and on the scene, the time delta between what you saw on TV versus what was reported online was comically large. Funny how these days it's really not much different, news sites tend to lag social media by a larger amount than I'd expect for 2026, and it's still publishing the same level of speculation and kind of vague, glossed over details (compared to just watching videos of the event semi-realtime)