I was six blocks north of the Towers when they fell. The reason it was hard to get the word out had nothing to do with the presence or absence of Twitter / FB

I was six blocks north of the Towers when they fell. The reason it was hard to get the word out had nothing to do with the presence or absence of Twitter / FB / etc. The reason it was hard was because all the cell towers were down (literally down: many of them were on top of the Towers) and the landlines were clogged with several million people making or receiving calls. Were this to happen in 2010, you'd see the exact same results. It might be a bit better, because more people would be using VOIP and the land-based Internet didn't go down, but that wouldn't have solved the issue.