I was taking a number of Computer Linguistics courses at the time and was in the lab of the CL department of my university all alone by myself when it happened. I was reading Slashdot at the time (a popular tech site and one of the first online forums), when people all of a sudden began posting threads with grainy pictures of these two skyscrapers on fire. Then someone posted the comment: "How does it feel for the doctor to have a taste of his own medicine?", and that was the moment it dawned on me that this wasn't some tragic plane accident I was looking at. Then Slashdot became increasingly hard to reload until it became unreachable. Then a panicked e-mail message came through a MAJORDOMO mailinglist I was a member of, which asked: "What the hell is happening in NY?", to which someone quickly replied with: "It appears that NYC is under attack.". I went to a number of mainstream sites to read the news, but they all started going down due to traffic overload, one after another. CNN, New York Times, BBC, they all went down. The Guardian was the only news site that remained up a bit longer than the others, and that was the first time I myself and many others discovered The Guardian. I didn't really understand what had happened until I went home that night and saw the mobile phone footage of the attacks that people had sent to CNN that they were broadcasting on repeat throughout the night, adding to it as more mobile phone footage from different angles was being submitted to them.