• by September 11, 2001

NEW YORK (AP) - Internet traffic slowed Tuesday and major news Web sites were sometimes difficult to reach as people craving details on the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks went online.

America Online's Instant Messenger service was sporadic in New York.

AOL's dial-up connections in New York were constantly busy, although the service was reachable by making long-distance calls to Chicago.

MSNBC.com, the most popular news site on the Web, was working without problems, but spokesman Ben Billingsley said technicians had removed graphics from the site to allow users to access the news faster.

Billingsley said he expected traffic be "enormous" on the news site but that for now they were "concentrating our efforts on covering the story."

Keynote Systems Inc., which measures Internet performance, said that by late morning the Web sites it tracked took slightly longer to reach - more than four seconds, instead of the average 3.5. No breakouts for news sites were immediately available.

Spokesman Mary Lindsay said Keynote did not find any widespread problems with the Internet's central backbones. But she expected to confirm regional outages as the company continues its analyses.

"We are hearing and once we checked into it a little further, we expect that we'll find regional problems as a result of the attacks," Lindsay said.