[alberth]

Personal anecdote: I was in college when 9/11 happened. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, radio was still a major part of daily life. iPods, iPhones, and streaming didn’t exist yet.

Morning radio shows often did live prank calls to keep things entertaining. DJs would pretend to be the president or do some other ridiculous bit, and it was usually silly / harmless / funny.

I remember driving to class that morning and hearing the first reports on the radio. My initial thought was, “If this is a prank, it’s not funny.” When I got to class and the professor cancelled because of what was happening, only then did I finally realized it was real.

[Markoff]

I was serving (mandatory) in military in my home european country, guys at our guard platoon desk were listening radio talking about some crashing plane, I just went outside the barracks in my spare time to netcafe to do some surfing and just noticed in news sites talk about some plane crash.

When I came back I've noticed we have suddenly CNN channel instead of our regular local TV station (they switched from regular programming to airing CNN live) with South American telenovelas (the guys watched it for pretty babes, I stayed usually with clerks around computers in captain's office playing games or chitchatting).

Then in the evening came barracks chief (don't remember position, I guess Mayor) telling us we are on high alert (though we didn't understand what have something in US to do with us in small european country, not even in NATO back then), we had to double guarding strategic objects (we were nearby NPP and also ammunition storage in forest).

First night after attacks I've spent on night shift next to fax to receive updates, luckily nothing interesting came and WW3 occured and we just continued with doubled guards for some time, which was actually better for the regular soldiers (not for me - office rat doing clerk work helping professional soldiers in office with paperwork and I had to go actually guarding 24hr shifts instead of sitting at computer and sleeping in our own more comfy clerk room), at least you had someone to talk to while doing your 2 hours round in cold forest. In the end they didn't prolong mandatory conscription (many were afraid they are gonna do it because of this) and we finished on time at the end of next April.

I doubt if I were not serving in military during 9/11 I would remember this day in such detail as European not affected by it (other then annoying heightened airport security later).

[picofarad]

My friend and I discussed that our generation didn't have a thing that we formed a cohort around. He said something like "catastrophe, tomorrow" and I said, probably in NYC and started recording the police/fire frequencies out of NYC. I went to bed sometime around midnight PST on the night of the tenth.

So I have the entire thing on police radio.

Just as a fluke.

There's a snippet on my SoundCloud.

[noman-land]

Please, please publish the entirety of this data. It is important historical record.

[elzbardico]

Nice try, FBI agent.

[technothrasher]

I 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.

[kevinsync]

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)

[organsnyder]

I remember trying to reach CNN.com on a school library computer. Eventually CNN put up a lightweight version that scaled better.

[tomjakubowski]

CNN Lite is still available. It's amazing how much better the experience is. https://lite.cnn.com/

[dmuth]

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.

[saltcured]

I recall slashdot briefly becoming more like a scalable citizen journalist site in the middle of its usual news aggregation and performative memes.

[romanhn]

Yup, I remember getting the updates from Slashdot while Yahoo was completely unusable due to overwhelming traffic.

[jghn]

I was in the car listening to Howard Stern. Someone called in about it. They treated it as a joke at first. As it started playing out they realized that not only was it real but it was more than just a simple accident.

THat's when I flipped over to the news radio station.

[ryandrake]

Once the event was underway, I recall Howard Stern providing rather good up-to-the-minute reporting about the event, by way of guests calling in. While the mainstream news was floundering around with stale info and generally not really knowing what was going on, you could get pretty decent information from the Stern show. Apart the occasional guest callers just calling in and shouting "baba booey," his coverage was quite good. Helps to remember this was way before Twitter, and there was not much "instant live reporting from the commoners" back then. All live news came from mainstream news behemoths.

[jimt1234]

This was my experience, too. I learned about it on my commute to work, listing to Howard Stern. And, yeah, at first I thought it was another stupid skit.

One thing that impressed me about Stern's broadcast that day is he kept calling for calm. One quote I'll never forget: "Don't go around beating up cab drivers." Not sure why that made an impact on me.

[brokenmachine]

I'm Australian but I downloaded that show to listen to it.

It was surreal hearing him say, "we're under attack" when the second plane hit.

He did a great job.

[Klonoar]

Tangent but I recall /. being one of the only sites that could withstand the onslaught of people trying to follow the news online.

Which is weird because writing this comment made me go glance at /. and it's sad what it ultimately became.

[lief79]

Yes, I was in college and it took me a while to realize I needed to actually turn on the news, because all the mainstream websites were wrong.

Oddly enough, neither of my classes were cancelled, despite being only a little over 2 hours down 95 from NYC.

[jghn]

It did! Once I confirmed it was real I wound up bouncing between the two. Such a surreal experience

[incanus77]

I too learned about 9/11 on the radio. I was driving to work, had stopped to get breakfast, and when I got back in the car and started it up, my in-dash CD hadn’t re-started yet and NPR was tuned in and the news came on. Was most of the way in, so headed in and read about things online the rest of the morning. There was no decent web video to watch, so only when I got to a TV later did I get the full picture.

[giancarlostoro]

You reminded me of one of my favorite radio pranks from back then, slightly less 9/11 tier, moreso funny prank.

There's a radio station in Miami that I guess did pranks over the air (I'm from Orlando so I never heard it) and someone animated one of their prank calls. They kept phoning this painter who was Dominican I think, and every time he would say "yes" to the question "Usted es el Pintor?" (Are you the painter?) they would play a clip from a song titled "Pintame" where the artist sings "PINTAMEEEE" and he would get mad, in one call they pretended to speak English just to trick him:

"are you the painter guy?"

"Yes"

"PINTAMEEEEEE"

He knew who it was immediately and went on a rant about how people all around town are yelling at him calling him "El Pintor" it was great, I bet he even got some customers out of it.

Anyway, someone animated it, and you can kind of find it on YouTube , used to be a flash movie. ;) I can't pull up the YouTube video while at work (its kind of locked down) or I would post it, it's mostly Spanish, but still cracks me up. I was showing it to my Mother In Law sometime back, she was busting out laughing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADntame_(song)