Web brings tears and joy

As the tragic events in New York and Washington unfolded live on television - beamed instantaneously across the word - so hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people turned to the internet for more information and to e-mail for news of loved ones, friends and work colleagues.

New Zealanders were among those who, unable to contact people by telephone, used electronic mail to circumvent the apparent meltdown of telecommunications in a city devastated by an act of terrorism never before seen outside of a movie theatre.

The internet allowed people to speak to each other - for some there was the joy of a return e-mail "I'm okay". For others a lingering doubt as e-mails went unanswered. Others used it to share their disbelief, their grief, to express their anger, sadness and to ultimately ask, "why?".

Gretchen Heefner of San Francisco was one of those who quickly went online to check on close friends in Manhattan. "Send word when you can," she wrote.

"I could not reach anyone on their home phone, cellphone or work phone from my phone, and so e-mail was the best way," she said.

"Fortunately, people were in their offices and have fast connections and could get their e-mail right away."

Rob Batchelder, an internet infrastructure specialist at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Connecticut, recalled how he instantly turned to the web as the television brought the first news of something terribly wrong.

His wife, Rosemary, was staying in a hotel room on the 27th floor of New York's Rockefeller Center and he was concerned.

He grabbed the phone to call her and got a wailing beeper and a recorded voice saying all phones were out. His mobile phone was silent as well. He then furiously typed in the addresses of web news site after web news site with little luck. Most didn't come on at all; the others took forever to load.

So Batchelder fired off an ordinary e-mail and got a most welcome reply from Rosemary.

She was shaken. Looking out of her window she had witnessed the passenger jet slam into the World Trade Center. As she tried to tell her husband more details their e-mail account froze.

So they moved to instant messaging, using software from America Online and Microsoft to chat in a small window in real time on their respective computers.

The lesson was obvious: "Operators of web sites offering news especially need to have a contingency plan just as corporations do for when disasters hit," he said.

The devastating events in the United States was probably the first time the world wide web has been pushed to capacity since it made it into the mainstream a little under 10 years ago.

Within hours of the news being broadcast some special web sites were hurridly erected to help bring people together.

American internet service provider Prodigy was the first to set up websites to let people who were close to the attacks to register that they were safe at its "I'm OK" online message centre.

Berkeley graduate students also established a site. Their World Trade Center Survivor database quickly expanded and showed that most people were recorded as being safe, but some were listed as injured, critical or missing.

As more and more people turned to the websites of the major news organisation for updates so they began to buckle under the pressure. The volume of traffic was simply too great for many.

To cope with the flood of visitors, staff at MSNBC.com removed graphics from the site to give users faster access to the news. CNN.com also streamlined its site, temporarily removing video, advertisements and non-breaking news.

Reaching the ABC News site was difficult until ABC took measures, including borrowing server capacity from sister company ESPN.com.

"It seems that the internet has failed in its first truly hard test as a news disseminator," concluded the British-based internet industry website The Register.

Auckland internet commentator Bruce Simpson, owner of the internet news website Aardvark, said he turned to the internet after watching a second airliner smash into the World Trade Center on television soon after 1 am on Wednesday.

But his efforts to log in to the websites of CNN, Yahoo, FoxNews and ABCNews were unsuccessful.

"Most of the mainstream news sites were inaccessible, and feedback I've had from people in the United States said the same thing was happening there."


The Herald website also had a surge in traffic, but the site coped with the increased demand.

Mark Ottaway, general manager of nzherald.co.nz, said the site received up to four times its normal number of visitors. And as the news broke in New Zealand, traffic climbed steeply from 6:30 am to peak at 1.8 to 2 gigabytes an hour.

Matt Bostwick, spokesman for internet service provider Xtra said his company received calls in the hours after the disaster from people who were unable to watch video of the attacks on international websites.

He said the number of page views to Xtra's website was about 40 per cent above average levels and had peaked between 10 am and 11 am.

Nielsen Netratings pacific region managing director Brian Milnes said New Zealand web surfers flocked to US news sites. New Zealand at-home audiences to the US news site cnn.com were 371 per cent higher than the daily site average for August. In Australia cnn.com's home based audience was 477 per cent higher.

A range of other US based news sites also received a rush of visitors, with audiences to msnbc.com up by more than 500 per cent against its daily average audience directly following the tragedy.

New York's major daily newspaper website nytimes.com had recorded more than 400 per cent audience growth by midday Wednesday.

Nielsen/NetRatings Australian operations managing director Brian Milnes said the internet was a vital tool for people to find out breaking news about the crisis.

"It is when the eyes of the entire world are drawn to a news event of such magnitude which continues to unfold on an hourly basis, that the internet really comes into its own as a news channel," he said.

Total time spent online by Australian home-based surfers at cnn.com grew by 1900 per cent overall in the 12-hour period after the attacks, and the average time spent by each user on the site was 398 per cent higher than the average time spent on the site during August.

In what amounted to the first test of the web under wartime conditions, people found Bill Gates's vision of a future of perpetual, always-on "information at your fingertips" shattered, if only temporarily.

Ironically, on the day that AOL Time Warner announced that America Online had added its 31 millionth customer, hardly any AOL users had the information they needed at their fingertips.

"Because we can't reach people by phone, people are sending out e-mails to let people know they are okay," said technology reporter Lisa Napoli. "I must have received dozens [of e-mails] from all over the world, many from people who said they had tried to call and couldn't get through."

Though the phone system is straining under the load, computer network connections appeared to be able to handle the stress, because the internet will pass information through alternative pathways when it encounters a blockage.

Matrix.Net, an Austin-based internet performance rating service, reported the internet recovered quickly after the attacks and appeared to be functioning close to normal levels by late Thursday - good news for agencies and individuals relying on e-mails and web communication.

Chat rooms were created on Yahoo and other sites to discuss the situation, mull over speculations on suspects and to offer thoughts and condolences.

"Really, I just want to say hang in there," said one writer on Craigslist.org, a popular grassroots internet community. "NYC is practically the centre of the universe. You still are, no matter what those maniacs try."

- AGENCIES, STAFF REPORTERS

Full coverage: Terror in America

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