American Airlines Flight 77 saw 56x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

American Airlines Flight 77 was an American domestic passenger flight from Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to Los Angeles International Airport in California that was hijacked by five al-Qaeda terrorists on the morning of September 11, 2001, as part of the September 11 attacks. The hijacked Boeing 757 was deliberately crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., killing all 64 aboard the flight and another 125 in the building.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "American Airlines Flight 77", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 4 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Background

What changed that day

The article grew by 1 characters that day. The largest single addition was 3 characters to Background. See everything that changed on 2026-09-11 in Wikipedia's own diff view — that is where the reason for a surge is usually visible, written and sourced by the editors who were following the story.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.