United Airlines Flight 175 saw 57x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

United Airlines Flight 175 was an American domestic passenger flight from Logan International Airport in Boston 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 airliner was deliberately crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center complex in New York City, killing all 65 people aboard the flight, and resulting in the deaths of more than 600 people in the South Tower's upper levels, in addition to an unknown number of civilians and emergency personnel on floors beneath the impact zone.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "United Airlines Flight 175", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 5 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Calls

What changed that day

The article lost 14 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 4 characters. 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.