Yahoo! Full Coverage editor Kevin Mooney remembers the morning of September 11, 2001, vividly: "It started as a normal late-summer day. As I was surveying the wires for the usual morning updates, emerging reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center set all of us up for a day like no other. The Internet initially struggled to keep up with the numbers of people trying to find out exactly what happened, and the ensuing chaos of the next sequence of events only made things worse."

As members of the Yahoo! News team awoke to the news, everyone from editors to engineers put personal emotions aside to focus on one thing: Providing our audience with the most comprehensive coverage possible, so people all over the world could fully understand what was happening. They scrambled to work in the pre-dawn hours to program news stories about the day’s events on the Yahoo! home page and across the Yahoo! network. Never before had their jobs seemed more important.

In the first two hours, our site saw an increase of 40 times our normal page views. Yahoo! News engineer Tony Tam remembers being asked to join an emergency conference call with Yahoo! co-founder David Filo and our operations, network operations, and Yahoo! News teams. He was unclear why our servers were being overwhelmed. "Turn on the TV," his colleagues told him. Then David asked, "Tony, how do we handle limitless demand for traffic? Users will consume as many page views as you can give them." Tony recalls, "We were trying to get as many web servers as possible. At that time we had about a tenth of what we have today. I remember properties like Yahoo! Finance had a bunch of 'retired' servers that they donated. And setting up a server was based on a lot of manual setup."

Yahoo! News assistant managing editor Ron Parsons says an engineer he'd never met tracked him down at home, asking if he was on top of the story yet. Back then our Yahoo! News service relied heavily on automated newswire feeds, so there was no news room, and the small team struggled to keep pace. They had to appropriate a television from the Yahoo! Sports team, and they hacked together a news module for our home page, recruiting people from different departments to write and hand-code the ever-changing headlines. "The tragedy helped punctuate the need for changes in how we organize our news operations," Ron says.

Ron added that there also wasn't much time to reflect on the events. "When you work in the news business, you can't sit and process it all because you have to get news out," Ron added. "Instead you worry about the logistics of keeping the site from overloading, deciding whether to take down images and advertising to help pages load faster. Last night, as I was watching a 9/11 documentary, it occurred to me how much more it all affects me today than it did five years ago. You just couldn't afford yourself the time. We spent 18-hour days at the office for the first few weeks. I know my boss slept in his cube quite a few times."

Today, we’re remembering 9/11 by bringing together news coverage of the anniversary from around the globe. In addition to providing news from our partners, we’re pointing to the most important stories and information from around the Web. We launched a special anniversary page that offers links to the latest news stories, editorials, photos, audio, videos, interactive features, and related web sites. In addition, we're featuring links to relief and aid organizations recommended by Yahoo! for Good, including the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. In 2001, our users donated more than $30 million to the American Red Cross and other relief agencies.

We’ve also created two original interactive features to commemorate the anniversary. The first features five Americans talking about how life has changed since 9/11, touching on the themes of spirituality, heroism, remembrance, and grief. The second features architectural historian Carol Willis discussing skyscrapers and the effect 9/11 has had on construction, engineering, and urban planning. These two pieces are the first original content of their kind on Yahoo! News.

Laura Hertzfeld
Yahoo! Full Coverage Editor