A quarter of a century after hijacked airliners tore through the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States and countries around the world marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Friday with memorial services, moments of silence, and personal testimony from survivors and those who lost loved ones.
What Happened That Day
On the morning of 11 September 2001, four passenger jets were seized by hijackers belonging to the Islamist extremist network al-Qaeda. Two planes struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, 17 minutes apart; both 110-storey buildings collapsed within two hours, engulfing lower Manhattan in smoke and dust. A third plane hit the Pentagon outside Washington DC. The fourth, United Flight 93, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers stormed the cockpit; investigators believe the hijackers had been aiming for the US Capitol.
In total, 2,977 people were killed, not including the 19 hijackers. Victims came from more than 90 countries, among them 67 Britons. New York City alone lost 441 first responders, the largest single loss of emergency personnel in American history.
How the Anniversary Was Marked
Ceremonies unfolded across the three attack sites throughout the day. In New York, the names of all 2,977 victims were read aloud at the World Trade Center memorial plaza starting at 8:46am local time, the exact moment the first plane struck the North Tower, punctuated by seven moments of silence marking each of the attacks and a tribute to responders who later died from related illness. The Tribute in Light installation once again beamed two columns of light into the night sky above the city, while later in the day the New York Philharmonic performed a commemorative concert and the Yankees and Mets played a memorial game.
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, officials read the names of the 40 passengers and crew of Flight 93 at the Wall of Names memorial, followed by a candle-lighting tribute in the evening. In Virginia, President Trump was due to speak at a ceremony at the Pentagon memorial. In London, a commemoration was held at the 9/11 memorial sculpture in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and services took place elsewhere in the UK, including at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh.
Voices of Survivors and Loss
Personal accounts have anchored much of the day’s coverage. Charles Wolf described watching a hijacked plane fly low over his New York apartment before it struck the North Tower, where his wife Katherine, originally from Swansea, was working; she died instantly. Wolf, a trained pilot, immediately suspected the crash was deliberate and later led a campaign to secure fairer compensation for victims’ families — a fight later dramatised in the Netflix film Worth.
Janice Brooks, who had moved to New York only weeks before the attacks to work on the 84th floor of the South Tower, recalled the chaos of evacuating as the second plane hit, describing a scream from an injured colleague that has stayed with her ever since. Sixty-one people from her office died that day.
A Turning Point With Lasting Consequences
Beyond personal grief, several public figures reflected on how the attacks reshaped politics, security policy, and society more broadly. MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum wrote that the attacks prompted a sustained international effort that has left al-Qaeda a fraction of its former strength, though he cautioned that the threat landscape today looks markedly different. BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner noted that 9/11 and the response to it shaped two decades of foreign, security and intelligence policy, and that while there have been many counter-terrorism successes since, intelligence agencies continue learning lessons from the intelligence failures that preceded the attacks.
Others spoke to the attacks’ effect on communities. Tower Hamlets councillor Rabina Khan recalled how British Muslims found themselves having to repeatedly answer for the actions of extremists in the aftermath, calling it a turning point in how the community was perceived. Welsh First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth, who covered the attacks’ aftermath as a journalist, remembered arriving in a suddenly transformed New York, and said much of the last 25 years of geopolitics can be traced back to that day.
UK political leaders, including the Prime Minister and Scotland’s First Minister, also paid tribute to the victims, with messages of solidarity emphasising that the attacks failed to achieve their aim of spreading lasting fear.
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