Slashdot was notable for being able to stay up - with people posting live updates and info on finding missing people.

ISTR usenet coming into its own, too

IRC was the source there for a couple weeks. Slashnet's channel was pretty good. You could see the fingerprints of the "unofficial releases" when the same story (often verbatim) hit all 4 IRC networks at the same time; then the news within the day. The "Let's Roll" story was conspicuously seeded.

Major media was sending out copyright takedowns within hours, often for photos they had no rights to in the first place. Our photo page got "we own this you can't show it" letters from multiple publishers, often on the same photo, several times for photos given to us (as public domain) by the people who took them.

Yep, I remember all the news sites like the BBC and CNN were failing to load and Slashdot was one of the best ways to stay up to date in the first three or four hours or so.

Slashdot was sufficiently lightweight and special-interest to stay usable.

My hero of the day - because I did not have cable, and the major networks were not too wonderful on reporting - was someone at CNN who hacked together a system that spat out the closed captions onto a moderated IRC channel. You could at least stay up with what was happening, scrolling back up to catch more info.

Read a lot of European newspapers as well.