The story of the Israeli who became the first victim of the 9 / 11 attacks

Daniel Levin.
Photos: Facebook

In the 9 / 11 attacks, Israeli 4 died, one of them was Daniel Levin, who heroically gave up his life in an attempt to resist the terrorists.

He was the passenger of the fatal flight No. XXNX of American Airlines.

Noticing how the two men sitting in front of him rose from their seats and headed towards the cockpit. Levin, who served in the elite unit of the IDF, guessed that they would attempt to seize the plane, and tried to neutralize them, but the attempt failed, one of the terrorists cut his throat, writes Jewish.ru.

In less than half an hour, on 8: 46 in the morning, the plane rammed the north tower of the World Trade Center. About what happened on board, it became known from the telephone conversation of the flight attendant Amy Sweeney with the control center.

When the terrible news about the tragedy spread in the media, tens of millions of people around the world rushed to computers to find out the details of what happened. Many sites did not collapse due to the strong growth of traffic only because they used the technology of redistribution of information flows within the global network, developed with the participation of Daniel Levin. He was the creator of the successful IT company Akamai Technologies, which optimized the delivery of Internet content to users.

Daniel was born in Denver and at the age of 14 he repatriated with his parents to Israel. When he was still a teenager, he won the prestigious Israeli bodybuilding contest, and when it came time to serve in the army, he managed to get him assigned to the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit.

After the 4-year service in the IDF, Levin enrolled at a leading Israeli technical university, the Haifa Technion. After receiving his second academic degree there, he continued his education in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In collaboration with his supervisor Tom Leighton, he developed a technology for optimizing Internet traffic and submitted an application for a university-wide startup competition. The competition jury, which considered that the technology developed by Levin had no practical application, did not award him a prize.

However, this failure did not stop him. After visiting several Boston venture capital firms, Levin raised enough funds to launch his own startup. He founded the company Akamai helped lucky occasion. 11 March 1999 in the United States almost simultaneously occurred two important events: the opening of the basketball championship of the National University Sports Association and the release of the trailer for the next blockbuster from the Star Wars series. The sharp increase in Internet traffic has led to the fact that many sites began to work intermittently or even fell. Some people noticed that those Internet resources that used Akamai technology did not experience such problems. The very next day, Levin’s company was overwhelmed with offers from potential customers.

Levin failed to stop the Islamists and prevent the terrorist attack that shook the whole world. But this does not detract from the significance of the feat he accomplished, because he turned out to be practically the only person on board who tried to resist the terrorists.

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