Egyptian Government Orders ISPs to Switch Off
The Egyptian government made headlines this week for blocking certain social networking sites. Now it appears as though the country is attempting to switch off the internet altogether.
Earlier this week, in an effort to crack down on protests, Egypt cut off access to Twitter, Facebook and, at one point, Google. Now, it seems the country has decided to completely ‘switch off’ the Internet by asking services providers to shut down all international connections to the Web.
Renesys reports that though critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now, Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are off the air.
“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,” writes James Cowie.
“Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers,” he continued, adding, “Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.”
The only company with a working connection is Noor Group. Renesys says it still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, and notes that the Egyption Stock Exchange is at a Noor address.
Read more from Renesys here.
- Egypt ,
- ISPs ,
- Internet ,
- Switched-Off ,
- Protests
- QuakeCon 2011 in August, Says Bethesda
- ano-Tech Used in Color-Changing Laptop
- Hot Apps of 2011 Week #4
- Crysis 2 Multiplayer Demo Coming to PC
- The AMD Radeon HD 6990 Dual GPU Card is Huge
- Congratulations to Our Sandy Bridge PC Winner!
- Sleeper Hit Magicka Sells 30,000 in 24 Hours
- Intel Releasing SATA 6.0 Gbps SSDs Next Month?
- Multicore CPUs in 45% Of Smartphones By 2015
- Microsoft May Bring Office to the App Store
- Intel Identifies Cougar Point Chipset Error, Halts Shipments
- Intel Identifies Cougar Point Chipset Error, Halts Shipments
- Sandy Bridge Debacle: What It Means for You
- Sandy Bridge Bug 2X Costly as Pentium Math Bug
- Nvidia Intros Dual-GPU Card Next Month?
- ARM Launches Cortex-R Processors
- StarTech Dock Hosts up to 4 External Drives
- Homefront PC Features Revealed, Shows LAN
wow! it's time for Egyptians to take modems... 33.6kbps or 56 kbps are just fine for mail... txt.. BBS.. if someone remembers what was that
one things is sure: switching internet it's not good! it's disaster! but let nnot get in to the politics here.
what is the point of trying a 33.6 pr 56kbps modem if the isp's have been forced by the egyptian government to shut down all internet links? If your using dialup you still need to telephone into a number provided by an ISP and all traffic will flow through the non fuctioning gateways, so still no internet access.
Do you guys really realise what this means? Information will get about by word of mouth, you dont need 33.6kps modems in these areas. As for if its a good thing or not only time will tell us.
It doesn't really matter. Many people continue to have internet, often through dial up. Better still, fax, telephone and telex machines allow news to get around too (telex machines are still widely used in most of the world in case you wondered).
It's only a matter of time before Mubarak is out. He lost control. The army no longer supports him and the police is divided.
And what's even better: Egypt is the local giant. People around the Arab world watch Egyptian tv shows, use Egyptian products and do business with Egyptian companies and individuals. If Egypt falls, the dominoes that started in Tunesia will truly start to fall.
If people have been living under a regime for so long, I don't think they'll be too worried about the net being temporarily disconnected..I think most people would most likely be more worried about who is going to look after their interests in the future.
Are we so safe over here, the way things are going? You've got recession after recession..more borrowing..more Obamafication and more net censorship in the wings. Two different places..often two, three or more different religions..different administrations..yet it seems the same old crap runs the show.