Hijackers in the September 11 attacks is drawing 70x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

The aircraft hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men affiliated with al-Qaeda, a jihadist organization based in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They hailed from four countries: 15 of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. To carry the attacks out, the hijackers were organized into four teams, each led by a pilot-trained hijacker who would commandeer the flight with three or four "muscle hijackers" who were trained to help subdue the pilots, passengers, and crew. Each team was assigned to a different flight and given a unique target to crash their respective planes into. Mohamed Atta was the assigned ringleader over all four groups.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Hijackers in the September 11 attacks", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 6 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Hijackers

What changed that day

The article lost 88 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 196 characters to Hijackers. 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.