WSJ -- Internet Was Critical For Worried Friends
September 12, 2001
Internet Was Critical
For Worried Friends
By SCOTT THURM
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When Robert Williamson heard of the apparent terrorist attacks, he feared for
two friends in New York. The 38-year-old account executive for a Norfolk,
Va., newspaper tried three or four phone numbers for each friend, but he heard
only busy signals, recordings and dead air.
Then he tried e-mailing his loved ones, as well as
a wider circle of friends who might have heard
from the two women. Within a few hours, both
e-mailed that they were unharmed. "The sense of
relief was overwhelming," said Mr. Williamson, looking at pictures of the two
women that adorn his cubicle.
As Mr. Williamson and others learned, the Internet proved the most reliable
way to communicate, as the phone system sagged from severed lines and an
extraordinary volume of calls. Corporate executives used e-mail to find
employees across town or across the country. Outside the World Trade
Center, strangers whose cellphones didn't work lent each other Blackberry
pagers to send messages to loved ones.
The Internet "turns out to be more reliable than the phone system," said Charles
Kline, a Silicon Valley consultant. As a graduate student at the University of
California, Los Angeles, in 1969, Mr. Kline helped design the network that
became the Internet and participated in some of the first transmissions.
The Internet's resilience is a legacy of design decisions Mr. Kline and his
colleagues made in the late 1960s, on what was then called Arpanet, after the
Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency, which funded the
effort to link universities and think tanks.
To complete a phone call, a physical circuit, a series of copper wires, must be
opened -- and kept open -- between the two phones. The Internet, by contrast,
works by breaking up e-mails, Web sites and other computer traffic into pieces
called packets, which are sent out on the network independently. The packets
can travel a variety of routes and then are reassembled at their destination.
E-mails are particularly resilient, because e-mail programs repeatedly try to
contact the destination computer until they succeed, Mr. Kline said.
Packet-switching can make the Internet unreliable for phone calls, because
sounds have to arrive in a precise order and without delay. But Tuesday, the
Internet was a "godsend" for Michelle Peluso, chief executive of online travel
agency Site59 Inc., whose offices are about three blocks from the World
Trade Center area.
Ms. Peluso was on her way out of her Greenwich Village apartment when she
heard about the attacks, so she retreated. She found one employee at work on
a cellphone and ordered the office evacuated, then she set out to contact her 65
other employees via the Internet. Within 90 minutes, she had found all but two
through e-mail or instant-messaging programs. With her cellphone useless and
her ordinary phone operating intermittently, Ms. Peluso also found employees
traveling in Louisiana and Kentucky via the Web.
Internet operators said they saw a surge in traffic as computer users flocked to
news sites for updates and turned to e-mail and instant-messaging services to
replace telephones. An AT&T Corp. spokeswoman said traffic on its Internet
backbone doubled. A Yahoo Inc. spokeswoman also said use of its
instant-messaging service surged.
Some news Web sites were almost impossible to reach for several hours
because of heavy traffic, according to Keynote Systems, which monitors Web
performance. Search engine Google at one point directed news seekers to get
off the computer and turn on radio or television. Computer users who wanted
to donate blood found the Red Cross site difficult to reach. But a Keynote
spokeswoman said the company didn't see "any significant problems" on the
Internet backbone.
For just getting in touch, however, nothing could match the Internet for much
of the day. Allan Hickok, an analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray in
Minneapolis, spent much of the morning sending two-word e-mails to friends
and colleagues in New York via his pager: "You ok?" Compared to the constant
busy signals he heard on the phone, Mr. Hickok said e-mail was effective and
his pager "phenomenally effective."
Rusty Rueff, an executive at Electronic Arts Inc., Redwood City, Calif., was
stuck in a United Airlines plane on the tarmac of the Indianapolis airport after
his 8 a.m. flight bound for San Francisco from New York was diverted.
Cellphone service was spotty, but Mr. Rueff used his Blackberry to get in
touch with his wife and colleagues.
David Smith, chief executive of Mediasmith Inc., a San Francisco online
advertising agency, used instant messaging to find the five employees of
Mediasmith's midtown New York office before they were evacuated. "I feel
better knowing what their situation is," he said.
Michael Demetriou, a 26-year-old Chicagoan who recently relocated from
Manhattan, found 25 friends in New York via e-mail and instant messaging. At
one point, He had 14 simultaneous instant-messaging screens on his computer.
Mr. Demetriou was especially concerned about a friend who works across
from the World Trade Center. Sending that friend an instant message, he was
relieved to receive a message in return that read, "I'm alive and OK."
-- Mylene Mangalindan, Dennis Berman, Shirley Leung, Deborah Solomon
and Khanh Tran contributed to this article.
Write to Scott Thurm at scott.thurm@wsj.com
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
