• Updated 9/11/01–3:00 p.m.

For reactions from the international community, here is a list of international papers available in English.

• Updated 9/11/01–2:00 p.m.

Most of the major news sites appear to be back up. Several of them (i.e. abcnews.com) have set up special stripped-down pages without graphics or extensive menus.

Overall Internet traffic does not appear to be especially slow.

Several bulletin board reports of people unable to reach family members by phone, who have succeeded in reaching them via email.

• Updated 9/11/01–1:00 p.m.

All major news sites have been down or VERY slow this AM:

cnn.com
msnbc.com
abcnews.com
nytimes.com
washingtonpost.com

Some discussion boards are up and running - people are cutting and pasting stories that they have been able to obtain.

"Secondary" news sources (i.e. Baltimore Sun site at sunspot.net) are up and running in many cases, and feeding AP wire stories.

Slow-downs on the Internet
The Internet was created as a decentralized collection of networks specifically to provide a means of communication in the event of a national disaster. And, all early reports show that the Internet infrastructure is up and running well.

However, the current architecture of the Web is such that an increase in user traffic to major Web sites can result in slower response time. In some cases, individual sites may experience such extreme traffic that they're unavailable temporarily.

Alternate news sources
In cases like this, where national Web sites may be unavailable, it's possible to find information from the following alternate sources:

Forum discussion boards
E-mail
Instant messaging
Local news sites
International news sites

For a related article, check out this Marketwatch article.