I was working at AOL Time Warner on 9/11 and our team helped out the CNN team to keep that site online. It was a crazy experience. I recall that Sun Microsyst

I was working at AOL Time Warner on 9/11 and our team helped out the CNN team to keep that site online. It was a crazy experience. I recall that Sun Microsystems had provisioned a huge datacenter room full of gear for another AOL project as a sort of "try before you buy" deal. We spent the afternoon kickstarting those machines and bootstrapping them as CNN content servers. It was a huge struggle just to keep everything online, given the massive surge in traffic that we were seeing. America had never seen an event like this since Pearl Harbor and most people didn't know what to do besides standing in front of a TV or--if you were at work--refreshing CNN all day. The idea of infra capacity to handle a news event of this magnitude wasn't something that had even been considered prior to 9/11.