Quote:Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.
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At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up. We will continue to dig into the event, and will update this story as we learn more. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.

Update (3:06 UTC)

One of the very few exceptions to this block has been Noor Group (AS20928), which still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, with inbound transit from Telecom Italia as usual. Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (http://www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address.

Its DNS A records indicate that it's normally reachable at 4 different IP addresses, only one of which belongs to Noor. Internet transit path diversity is a sign of good planning by the Stock Exchange IT staff, and it appears to have paid off in this case. Did the Egyptian government leave Noor standing so that the markets could open next week?

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egyp...rnet.shtml


I am looking for an investor to sell sattelite Net to Egypt.

Apparently mobile networks are down too.

wtf? seriously?

So are we going to be air dropping in pictures of "lol cats" for them? And think of all the farmville farms that will be over grown!!!

But it all seriousness, this is a joke, it should be made a harshly punishable international offence for governments to interfere with peoples internet access. It really is the best tool people have to bring down governments they don't want.

I can't think of a better way for the gov't to FORCE people to bring them down. We stay pacified with Farmville. We have no time for a revolution when there are crops to harvest. (I say that as a generalized "we"...some of us actually know how long it takes for tomatoes to grow and ripen... [narrowed eyes])

http://twitter.com/#!/arabist/status/30786981814341632

Exactly.

http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

The Egyptian government seems following the old Aussie saying "keep them in the dark and feed them bull dung".

(January 28, 2011 at 5:48 pm)ziggystardust Wrote: The Egyptian government seems following the old Aussie saying "keep them in the dark and feed them bull dung".

You can't blame them for using a strategy that's worked so well in America.