Today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11 do you remember what you were doing when you saw the news?

[Shmoigel]

I remember every single bit of that day like it was yesterday. I had only visited the WTC 3 months earlier too. Thinking about the families and survivors and emergency workers today.

We were at work near the Canary Wharf tower at the time listening to the radio. Absolutely shocked silence in the office. Then someone found a tv from somewhere and it was out on. No work done all afternoon. I phoned my parents. Bosses considered evacuating the building as we thought London might be targeted. I was meant to meet a load of friends that night but we cancelled.

I still have the guardian newspaper from the next day. The falling people images were/are still haunting.

We were on a long trip the following year and were in New York in June and visited ground zero. There was a huge hole and massive area where the towers had stood - much bigger than I’d imagined.

I had been in NYC with my dad, flew back on 10 September. On 09 September, before I headed for the airport, we went to WTC, up to Windows on the World, did some shopping in the mall, the usual. I was 25, my dad was there on work, and it was great to be with him, getting to have a much nicer experience than my J1 student visa experience 5 years previously! He took a photo of me outside, I've a grumpy face on me because he was very annoying taking photos and they were always awful (my poor dad).

On 11 September I was back in work, and after lunch, one of my colleagues phoned me and said, 'were in you in the WTC when you were in NY?', I replied, that I had been, two days before, and he then let me know that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. I remember we were really quite unconcerned initially, we assumed it was a small aircraft, and I remember saying as we gathered in our conference room watching it on TV, do you think anyone will be injured? (Sounds so ridiculous now, but we had no frame of reference for this, we believed the towers were so iconic and permanent, no particular damage was possible).

Suddenly, the first tower to collapse fell before our eyes and I can remember the utter panic - and only then did I think about my dad. I wasn't very concerned as although he was still in NY, he was not due to be anywhere near there. As it happened, he had left that morning, just as the attacks took place, on a train to Connecticut, and was unaware of the attacks until he got there. His work was with a university, and I remember talking to him the next day, when the rest of world was in complete shock and nearly at a standstill, and he said that apart from a few mentions, the work had continued as normal, they met their US counterparts, did some visits / tours, had a meal, all the normal elements of a working visit. I found that so strange at the time, wondering if they didn't care because it was New York and they were in Connecticut but I realise now they probably were in complete shock and didn't know how to process what had happened so just kept going.

I always think of the people I would have incidentally interacted with that day e.g. the staff in Windows in the World, and the possibility less than 48 hours later they might have lost their lives.

I was in central London, at home, DH was at work. I didn’t have a tv, a neighbour told me there had been this awful accident in New York, he thought it was weird. I went in to his to look at the news, then we watched the second plane hit. So shocking, unbelievable. I called DH who was watching at work, he came home.
Aside from the absolute shock and horror of what was happening in NY, there were rumours about London being next and we were pretty scared, as well as trying to process the images on tv. A good friend worked for an international bank and he sometimes worked in the WTC, I didn’t know if he was there or not. Thankfully he had been there the week before, but was abroad somewhere else at the time. He did lose colleagues.
I still have nightmares that I think relate to seeing the footage that day, the live images of the second plane hitting the building and the towers falling. Im sure all of us who saw the attacks unfold have been affected by it.
Then 7:7 like the heavily pregnant pp, I had a new baby, now 21, and we lived close to one of the bombs. I didn’t go on a tube again until this year.

I was working in One Canada Square, watching it unfold in real time as we had tv's all around the office. The planes from city airport would take off directly in my eye line which was very unnerving.
Shortly after lunch one of the American companies sent their very distressed staff home, and a news crew (bear in mind this was the tallest building in Europe at the time, I shudder to think what they were waiting for) filmed them leaving the building and incorrectly reported that the building was being evacuated; one of our staff saw this on the tv, panicked, and set of the fire alarm. We all had to leave via the stairwell, it was so quiet going down those stairs and seemed never ending.
I remember the next day, going down to the foyer and coaxing a petrified staff member to enter the elevator.
Those poor people will never be forgotten, I think of them every year, may they R.I.P.

I was in year 5 at school. And my English teacher told us what had happened. I remember thinking what’s the World Trade Centre ? As had never heard of the building before. And certainly didn’t process the sadness and enormity of it all. Then coming home to all the news coverage.

I had just come out of the shower after dinner, and saw the burning tower on TV as I came out.

Very odd day that I remember everything that happened that afternoon. I had got back from picking eldest up from preschool and given them lunch. Then they were playing and I was waiting for an afternoon sit down to play and also watch my guilty pleasure of diagnosis murder that was coming on bbc1. It had been on 5 minutes when they interrupted with a news flash and I couldn't move away from the tv the news was live as the second plane hit and then I called my husband at work and told him what had happened. The whole world seemed to get very quiet outside. And this was the uk.

Absolutely. I was working in an office in London in my first "proper" job. We got first word on the internet - my boss called out "a plane has hit the world trade centre" - but then it went completely down and she put the radio on and we all listened to it unfold
that evening I got the tube home and I will never forget the image on the front of the Evening standard of the towers ablaze.

I then sat at home watching the telly in silence with my two housemates and their boyfriends. We all sat in stunned silence.

I was in the shower freshening up before a smear. Dh came and got me out the shower. I remember wrapped in a towel dripping on the living room carpet.

i couldn’t get my head round it at all but had to leave for my smear test. At this point only one plane had gone in and I was telling the nurse about it while she did my smear. I said i thought it was a small plane.

i put the radio on in the car on the way home and realised a second plane had hit the other tower by then.

So sorry for your loss.

We were off work that week planning our wedding.

We'd had a nice drive, nice breakfast and chose our wedding invitations. When we got into the car initially we thought it was the Miller add. My family owned a bar and had had lots of promotional material about a competition weeks before it featured two planes and a tall building. Took a while to sink in what was happening. A completely surreal experience.

Yes, I was at work. A friend texted me and I put BBC News on on the internet. This was about the first time I'd followed a news story online. For some reason I didn't factor in the time difference initially and thought it had happened hours earlier. Turned out someone I knew had stayed in the Marriott at the WTC the day before too.

It was horrific. Initially pretty widely thought to be a terrible accident, then it became clear it wasn't. And it got worse. Those poor people and those brave people - including those who helped others in many different ways, the emergency services, the passengers on United 93. Hard to believe it was a quarter of a century ago.

I was working at a police station in Sheffield and the police inspector who worked in the office next door (and had a tv because she was important) told us to come and watch what was happening. We were in total disbelief, especially when the second plane hit.
I watched a documentary called 'The Falling Man' a few days ago. I cried a lot.

I saw something online the other week that said we will soon be at a tipping point where there will be less people who remember being where they were on 9/11 than people who either weren’t born or were too young too remember.

Which seems crazy because it seems like yesterday to me!

I was 26. I came into the living room just as the second plane hit, and thought my mother had accidentally tuned in to some awful action movie. I then saw the words ‘BBC Live’ in the corner of the screen and was horrified that it was real. I remember saying the Lords Prayer in my own living room that day more than once as the events unfolded. It was terrifying.

Walking through Queen St station on the way to college. It was eerily silent except for this wee TV on the news stand that a lot of people were huddled around.

It wasn't alarming as such, because I think we were used to seeing war on the news so was a bit blase

This has melted my brain a bit! If we assume anyone say ten and older would remember, I guess that does indeed mean that most people under 35 or thereabouts wouldn’t really remember. Sobering.

I was at home in the US Midwest with 3-week old baby DC5 and toddler DC4. My mum had walked the older three to school and she and DC4 were watching Sesame Street. I had returned to bed with the baby after getting the older three up, washed, dressed, and fed. Mum came into my bedroom to tell me the programming had been interrupted on every channel because something had happened in New York city: a plane had hit a building.

I got up and watched the confusion unfold on morning programmes. My mum correctly guessed it wasn't an accident and was also correct to surmise the cross country flight meant the plane had a lot of fuel on board.

Eventually we saw the second plane hit the second tower, live on TV, and then the collapse of the towers, one after another, firemen and paramedics so bravely running toward the disaster, people covered in dust walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and crowds waiting for the Staten Island ferry.

The school phone tree sprang into action, and mum headed off to pick up the older DCs as requested. The skies became silent as planes were diverted to the local.airports.. Military jets appeared very high up. About an hour after the DCs got back from.school, commuters started filing home from the local stations as the nearby city was evacuated (there were fears the tall buildings would make excellent targets). There was gridlock on the expressway.

Mum and I tried to contact a relative and their spouse who lived in lower Manhattan, but there was no response at all when we dialed, not even a message about the number being unavailable. We ended up calling relatives of the couple in the UK to see if there was any news. Luckily, they were away from the city on a holiday (that ended up lasting much longer than they had expected). They ended up couch surfing in other parts of NYC for weeks when they were eventually able to fly back.

The TV coverage went on all day, with news of the Pentagon attack and the plane that went down in Pennsylvania..

The DCs went outside to play. It was a picture perfect early autumn day. My parish church held a standing room only interfaith prayer service that evening.

Mum's return flight to Dublin was scheduled for the 12th but was canceled of course. She had to stick around for another week.

I was at college. One of the kids had a phone and said something bad was happening but most of us didn’t have any way of finding out more until we got home.

Like many others I can remember it vividly.

i was at work (a racehorse stud farm) holding mares for the farrier with the radio on in the background when we heard about the first plane. We all carried on with our jobs and I headed out to the field to paint the fence.

My colleague was in the tractor cutting grass in another field with his radio on and he drove over to us to tell us the South Tower had collapsed.

It wasn’t till I got home from work at about 4pm that I saw any of the footage. My housemate and I were in the process of moving house so half our furniture had already been moved so we sat on the living room floor with our mouths open watching the footage until about 11pm. We didn’t even think to make any dinner.

My thoughts today are with everyone who was personally affected 25 years ago.

Reading these brings back some of the absolute horror and shock of the day.

I think a lot of that horror was not knowing at the time ‘is that it or is there more?’ - which I’d forgotten the stress of until this thread. We kept hearing low planes go over (London) that afternoon and panicking.

It’s horrific to look back at the events now, but as least we know the entirety of them - it was ‘only’ four planes and ‘only’ one day, one country - awful as that obviously is.

In real time we had no idea if there were dozens of planes hijacked or cities targeted, no clue about when this would end - it was terrifying.

@Iwantroplayanothergame I’m so sorry for your loss.

I'd gone to visit my Mum, walked into the living room to see the first crash on the tv. I remember standing there watching in horror as it all unfolded. It was truly chilling and the day has stayed with me.
My thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones today.

It’s like WWII - there’s almost no one left alive who fought and even those who were young children at the time are in their 80s now.

As a result we see the rise of extreme right-wing ideology once again. As the saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

I remember messaging my colleague that a second plane at it (up till then thinking it was an accident) and him telling me he was sure it was nothing. Listening to the radio on the way home trying to get any information and then stood watching the tv when we got home.

Yes like yesterday. I was walking the 2 minutes from home to collect a child from school when I got a call from my mother, telling me. I got the child and walked home, tried to do everything as normal, and waited until she was in bed before putting on the tv. I was scared stiff as at that stage we didn’t know much, and the fear was of full scale attack on all of us.