No Better Time

by Molly Knight Raskin

  It was not until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. on September 10 that Lewin and Leighton wrapped up their work. Lewin had a flight to catch to California in just a few hours, so he said goodbye to Leighton. Late that night, Lewin chose to return to the home he shared with Anne and the boys. In the weeks prior to this, he and Anne had begun to reconcile, and just recently decided to give their marriage another chance. The two of them hoped, Anne said, to remain together for the rest of their lives.

  Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, Lewin kissed Anne goodbye and drove from his home to Boston’s Logan International Airport. He arrived just in time to catch American Airlines Flight 11, scheduled for departure at 8:00 a.m. and bound, nonstop, for Los Angeles. It was a trip he had taken so many times—more than thirty in the past year—that he knew the flight crew by name, the numbers of the most comfortable seats, and the makes and models of the aircrafts. The plane was partially full—81 passengers, 9 crew members, and 2 pilots, Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness.{78}

  Like Lewin, many of the passengers seated in business class were traveling for work on the daily scheduled flight: a television producer, actress, photographer and several businessmen. But Lewin was a standout among them, dressed more like a college kid—in his Gap blue jeans, t-shirt, and grey Nike sneakers—than an Internet entrepreneur. Lewin settled into his seat, 9B, and pulled out his Blackberry to make a phone call before departure.{79} Co-workers say Lewin almost always made calls up until the moment one of the flight attendants reprimanded him for failing to shut down his device. Around 7:30 a.m., with the plane still sitting on the runway, he called Akamai’s in-house attorney, David Judson. Lewin knew Judson was an early riser and often one of the first to arrive at the office. He wanted to check on some paperwork Judson had been preparing for an upcoming deal. Judson said Lewin sounded full of energy despite the sleepless night and looming layoffs. They spoke for about fifteen minutes, until Lewin abruptly ended the call in preparation for takeoff.

  “I’ve gotta go,” Lewin told Judson. “They’re telling me I have to hang up my phone.”

  American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Logan on schedule at 7:59 a.m. The plane headed due west and held on course for sixteen minutes until it passed Worcester, Massachusetts. Then, instead of taking a southerly turn, it suddenly swung to the north. Just before 8:14 a.m. the plane failed to climb to its assigned cruising altitude of 29,000 feet.{80}

  At this point, it’s possible Lewin suspected—perhaps before anyone else on the flight—that something terrible was about to happen. Having trained in the IDF’s most elite counter terrorism unit, he had learned to identify signs of attacks well before they were carried out. He also knew conversational Arabic, enough to have picked up on verbal cues if the five Middle Eastern passengers gave any.

  Around 8:15 a.m. a bloody hijacking began on board. Five terrorists—all of them wielding box cutters and knives—rose from their seats in business class and began to threaten passengers and the crew. Most of what we know about the hijacking comes from reports by two flight attendants in the coach cabin, Betty Ong and Madeline “Amy” Sweeney, who calmly and courageously relayed details of the hijacking as it unfolded to authorities on the ground. At 8:19 a.m., Ong told flight control, “The cockpit is not answering, somebody’s stabbed in business class—and I think there’s Mace—that we can’t breathe—I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.” In a separate call, Sweeney reported the plane had been hijacked and two flight attendants had been stabbed. Sweeney also confirmed that a passenger in business class had been stabbed to death, his throat slashed by one of the terrorists. The passenger, she said, was sitting in 9B—the seat assigned to Danny Lewin.{81}

  Based on the evidence gathered from these phone calls and authorities on the ground, the 9/11 Commission Report concluded that, in those first twenty minutes of the flight, Mohamed Atta—the only terrorist on board trained to fly a jet—probably moved to the cockpit from his business-class seat (located within arm’s reach of Lewin’s seat), possibly accompanied by Abdulaziz al-Omari. As this was happening, according to the report, Lewin, who was seated in the row just behind Atta and Omari, was stabbed in the neck by one of the hijackers—probably Satam al-Suqami, who was seated directly behind Lewin, out of view.

  Between 8:25 and 8:32, in accordance with the FAA protocol, Boston Center managers started notifying their chain of command that AA Flight 11 had been hijacked and was heading toward New York Center’s airspace. At 8:44, Sweeney made her last call to ground control: “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent . . . We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low.”

  Seconds later, Sweeney said, “Oh, my God, we are way too low.” Silence.{82}

  At 8:46 a.m., the Boeing 767 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, killing everyone on board.{83}

  Chapter 11

  Gutted

  “One man’s candle is light for many.”

  — TALMUD ON SHABBAT

  IN BOSTON THAT MORNING, the sky was the same deep, brilliant blue as it was across the Northeast, but the air felt slightly cooler, just bracing enough to carry with it the invigorating sense of possibility that comes with early autumn.

  The day began like most at Akamai, with the staff trickling in around 8:30 a.m. Many people had recently returned from summer vacations and were still settling back into work. They were also adjusting to Akamai’s new reality—a stock trading at around $3 a share, a shrinking customer base, and talk of impending layoffs. The mood was slightly quieter than usual, with Lewin, Leighton, and Conrades all out of the office. And those who had attended the lengthy meeting the day before were focused on carrying out a drastic shift in strategy.

  Sometime before 9:00 a.m., the NOCC staff began to notice an unusual spike in Internet traffic, one that wasn’t limited to one region or pathway. Someone checked the news and reported that a small plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. No one was too alarmed, assuming that the accident involved a small aircraft that had veered off course. Within minutes, however, it became clear the news was much worse and much more personal than anyone could have imagined. Someone shouted out that a second plane had hit the towers, and at the same time, it seemed everyone’s cell phones and desk phones began to ring.

  One floor above the NOCC, David Judson was in his office working on the notes he and Lewin had discussed that morning. Around 9:30 a.m., he received a phone call from his wife, who alerted him to the developing news. At some point, Judson said, she mentioned that the first hijacked flight had originated from Logan and that it was headed for Los Angeles. Judson said the second he heard this, he abruptly ended the call blurting out: “Oh, my God, I’ve gotta go. Danny was on that flight.” Judson went straight to Sagan’s office, just around the corner from his.

  “Paul, Danny was on that flight,” Judson said.

  “Are you certain?” asked Sagan.

  Judson recounted his conversation earlier that morning, and told Sagan that Lewin had called from the tarmac just as the flight was preparing for takeoff. Judson felt sickened.

  He and Sagan wanted to hold out some hope, but they both knew there was no reason to. Lewin was on the flight, and Judson suddenly realized he was almost certainly the last person at Akamai to speak with him before he was killed. Sagan said his journalistic instinct—one sharpened over decades spent covering tragedy for broadcast news—kicked in almost instantly. Only this time, the tragedy was personal.

  Oblivious, Leighton was working from home that morning, supervising some renovations to the house that he and Berger had long planned to carry out but seemed never to have the time for. He was also preparing for a new class at MIT, which he was scheduled to begin teaching the next day. When he heard the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, Leighton said he turned on the television. “I saw disaster unfolding,” Leighton recalled. It wasn’t until he heard a newscaster say that one of the hijacked flights had
left Logan bound for Los Angeles that Leighton began to think about Lewin. “That’s when I got that chill up my spine that you get when you know something might have happened,” he said. “I thought, ‘What if he’s on that plane?’ Then I thought, ‘No, he can’t be.’”

  Leighton tried to contact the office, but by this time the phone lines were jammed and he couldn’t reach anyone. So he got in the car and drove in. “You know it was one of those things where you have a feeling that’s like a nightmare—no, this can’t be real,” he recalled. When Leighton arrived at Akamai, he saw Anne Lewin in the lobby, crying. “That’s when I knew,” he said.

  It would be days before the airlines confirmed passenger manifests from the four hijacked flights, two of which originated from Logan. But for Lewin’s family, friends, and co-workers, Lewin’s phone call to Judson, combined with the widespread knowledge that he had been booked on the regularly scheduled flight to Los Angeles, was evidence enough to confirm their loss. By 10:00 a.m., the entire office was gripped by a collective state of shock and grief. No one knew what to do. They felt like they’d been gutted.

  Outside of Akamai, an eerie silence had fallen over Cambridge as people retreated indoors, seeking safety amidst rumors of a possible attack on Boston. Government officials ordered the mandatory evacuation of several of the city’s financial institutions, federal offices, and large residential buildings along the waterfront. Police and U.S. Marshals were dispatched to patrol the streets and maintain order as a mass exodus from the city began.{84} At Akamai, however, no more than a few people left the building. In part, they were paralyzed by anguish. But they were also watching traffic on the Internet escalate like never before. Between embraces and audible sobs, they stared in disbelief at the screens in the NOCC, which were lighting up with lines of traffic spanning the globe. The office phones reached a fever pitch; the Web sites of some of Akamai’s biggest customers were buckling. With telecommunications failing and people around the world desperate for information about their loved ones, several of these customers—including the Red Cross, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, in a tragic twist of irony, American Airlines—could not afford for Akamai to fail.

  Someone at Akamai needed to take the reins. CEO George Conrades and CFO Tim Weller were out in California for meetings and could not be reached. Leighton was in what he called a state of shock, so devastated he was unable to think clearly. Sagan had no choice but to take charge. “That day, an inordinate amount of responsibility fell on my desk, and for me, it was horrible,” he remembered.

  That morning, time seemed to slow down and every second brought with it more bad news, heightened anxiety, and various, painful stages of grief. Fortunately, Sagan said, “I had total clarity about what needed to be done.” He added, “There are these times in life, and 9/11 was one of them for me, when all the unimportant things disappear. I went into this zone, which some people may have interpreted as unfeeling, but for me, it was just about how do we get from A to B to C.”

  At some point, Sagan sent an e-mail to the entire company confirming what most of them already knew: Akamai had not only lost its visionary co-founder, it had lost its heart and soul.

  Ever since the writing of his prize-winning master’s thesis in 1998, Lewin had called attention to the unpredictable nature of news, foreseeing a time when technology rooted in his algorithms would have the power to keep the Internet alive under an extraordinary crush of traffic. On September 11, 2001, the day of Lewin’s death, the Internet faced its greatest test ever as news of the attacks made its way around the world. Everyone at Akamai faced a stark choice: pause and grieve or press onward. The answer, Sagan said, was clear: “We had to do what Danny would do.”

  Through a fog of grief, engineers spent the entire day reconfiguring servers to build capacity on Web sites for news, aid, and security organizations. The sales team set up a phone chain to contact clients and inform them of the news, while at the same time assuring them that Akamai was committed to serving their traffic throughout the tragedy. “We immediately went into all-hands-on-deck mode,” recalled Sef Kloninger, who was managing the company’s engineering and service performance.

  That day, almost every major new site used Akamai services, including ABC.com, The Chicago Tribune, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Post, and the The Washington Post. And many of them called the company for crisis management. A Web tech at MSNBC, which was still using FreeFlow, not EdgeSuite, called to say the site was going to have to strip its pages to the lightest possible load or risk crashing. Engineers at Akamai helped them install EdgeSuite, and by mid-day on 9/11, MSNBC was able to deliver rich content, including 12.5 million streams of video, with Akamai’s help. At Washingtonpost.com, a similar scenario unfolded. During an average day, the site had been running about thirty percent of its content, primarily images and video, from Akamai servers. That day, the newspaper relied on Akamai to serve more than fifty percent of its traffic and keep it flowing smoothly.{85}

  At CNN, engineers were scrambling to keep CNN.com online. Earlier in the year, with the presidential election and the AOL–TimeWarner merger complete, the CNN Internet team had decided that it had sufficient server and network capacity to bring back the traffic served by Akamai to its own data centers. But the spike on 9/11 proved to be the Web equivalent of a 100-year flood. As the world became aware of the news, traffic to the Web site was doubling every 7 minutes, and the usual procedures—reallocating servers from less busy sites and reducing the size and content on the homepage were not enough to stay ahead of the tide.

  Between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., the systems team increased the servers for CNN.com from 10 to 44, and reduced the homepage to a single headline and image. At that point, however the site’s internal network itself began to fail under the strain. There were other obstacles to quick response—much of the management team, including Gassel, was in Northern Virginia at a company-wide conference, which was rapidly abandoned. Others were in New York or still at home. With phone lines busy and networks jammed, communications were difficult and systems monitoring flaky.{86}

  After additional attempts to relieve the network load, CNN reached out to Akamai, tested the old configurations, and by 1:30 p.m., Akamai was once again serving CNN’s images. The site soon stabilized enough to return to a “light” but informative homepage.{87}

  During that early afternoon lull, Gassel sent an email to Sagan and Lewin, thanking them for Akamai’s help. Sagan replied, and informed Gassel that Lewin had been killed. Gassel recalls that “until that point I had been entirely focused on trying to keep the network running. The loss of Danny, who had become a friend, suddenly made the events of the day both real and personal.”

  Knowing that there would be a heavy load for several days, over the rest of the afternoon and evening CNN staff continued to redeploy servers, and AOL engineering contributed 108 newly arrived servers of their own. Total Traffic on 9/12 was double that of 9/11, and CNN would run in this configuration for another two months.

  Web traffic for Akamai’s global network of clients, including the major news media sites, surged by a factor of five throughout the day. Akamai managed the crush, serving more than 1,000 billion hits and 150 million video streams related to the catastrophe. “September Eleventh was a day that proved everything Danny was saying—that this could be done, that this will work,” Leighton said.

  “It was surreal,” declared Seelig, who recalled working about eighteen hours straight after learning of Lewin’s death. “In one day, Akamai went from the depths of despair to demonstrating to the world that we could do all the things we had promised. And then some. That’s because of what Danny built.”

  At about 5:00 p.m., Sagan sent an e-mail to the company thanking everyone for their work. The Internet withstood its most titanic test ever, he wrote, and Lewin would be proud.

  In Israel, around 10:00 a.m. Tuesday morning on September 11, hours before Lewin had boarded his flight in Boston, Peggy and Charles Lewin landed at Ben Gurion a
irport in Tel Aviv, tired but invigorated by the visit with Danny, Anne, and the two boys.

  Around 4:00 p.m. that day, Peggy, who was at work, said Charles came into her office, located above their apartment, to tell her about an airplane smashing into the World Trade Center. Confused about the time and date, Peggy said at first she wasn’t concerned. Thinking it was Monday, September 10, she assured Charles that Danny wasn’t traveling. Soon after, the phone rang. It was Anne, calling to say she was certain that Danny was on Flight 11, and that he had been killed.

  Devastated, the Lewins gathered to sit shiva (the Hebrew grieving period of seven days). It would be months before they had any concrete details of what happened on that flight, but they didn’t need them. They knew that Danny would have never, ever gone down without a fight.

  Although no flights were allowed out of, or into, the U.S. at the time, the Lewins reached out to El Al, the Israeli airlines, to ask if they could get on the first allowed flight bound for America to mourn the loss of their son, one of just five Israelis killed in the attacks. Three days later, U.S. authorities gave El Al permission to fly from Tel Aviv to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Thousands of people were clamoring to get on the flight, the first allowed into U.S. air space since the attacks. Officials at El Al later said they saved four seats for the Lewins the moment the family called to report the loss of Danny.

  On September 14, they arrived in New York and took a taxi all the way to Brookline to be with Anne, Itamar, and Eitan. Michael Lewin recalled the streets having so much traffic that the driver sped off in the emergency lanes to get the grieving family to the Boston suburb as quickly as possible. They stayed for just over a week, long enough to sit shiva with Anne and the boys, and to attend a memorial service for Danny held, fittingly, at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium on September 20, 2001.