Egypt leaves the Internet, citizens revolt. Update: Internet's back, still revolting.

[SebC]

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.

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 Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers.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

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/...internet.shtml

Wow. I think if there's one good way to piss off a population, this is it.

[CrusaderPi]

Wow. This Tunisia thing is really spreading. Never a good thing to have a government like that running scared.

[Joborule]

How is a country to function without the internet?

[Frequitude]

Holy crap. What the heck's going on? Coles notes?

[Ozy_Flame]

Smartphones . . . Do these Egyptian ISP's have any control over those?

If not, looks like we're heading for another Iran-style Twitter revolution.

[CaptainCrunch]

Give me back my porn!!

[rubecube]

Internet? Is that thing still around?

[Dan02]

Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame

Smartphones . . . Do these Egyptian ISP's have any control over those?

If not, looks like we're heading for another Iran-style Twitter revolution.

They've already been intermittently disrupting access to both Twitter and Facebook. See they learned from Iran. I would assume this would affect smartphone internet access as well.

[HPLovecraft]

Viva la revolution!

[drewboy12]

I didn't even know Egypt had computers yet.

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Give me back my porn!!

Oh, don't tell me you've been seduced by those Egyptian porn sites, Captain. Yeah, I know that sarcophagus fetish sites have some pretty crazy stuff, but maybe you can take this unwelcome downtime to scale yourself back to japanese porn. You'll find you'll be able to look at yourself in the mirror again.

[Trojan97]

Originally Posted by rubecube

Internet? Is that thing still around?

I laughed way harder at this post then I probably should have. Well done.

[VladtheImpaler]

Did the CRTC ok this?

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Give me back my porn!!

There's good porn from Egypt?

On a side note... Hopefully this thing spreads all the way to Iran again and fixes that place up.

[icarus]

Despite ISPs and cell phone providers being shut down people are still e-mailing and tweeting remarks from Egypt, as can be viewed in this live BBC thread:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698

[Cowperson]

In all seriousness, I came in this morning with the intent of updating a client in Cairo by e-mail . . . . . so much for that!!

I'll try anyway . . . .

Cowperson

[ricosuave]

Originally Posted by octothorp

Oh, don't tell me you've been seduced by those Egyptian porn sites, Captain. Yeah, I know that sarcophagus fetish sites have some pretty crazy stuff, but maybe you can take this unwelcome downtime to scale yourself back to japanese porn. You'll find you'll be able to look at yourself in the mirror again.

sickie.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by octothorp

Oh, don't tell me you've been seduced by those Egyptian porn sites, Captain. Yeah, I know that sarcophagus fetish sites have some pretty crazy stuff, but maybe you can take this unwelcome downtime to scale yourself back to japanese porn. You'll find you'll be able to look at yourself in the mirror again.

Do you know how long it took for me to cure my addiction to multiple amputee small obese person porn.

Japanese Porn would almost be softcore compared to that.

On a more serious note, its amazing how the seeds of revolution have grown from one small insignificant nation to spread to a number of nations in no time at all.

The biggest fear of dictator based government is not an insurgency, but the sudden appearance of peaceful or near peaceful protests threatening popular revolt.

This is a very interesting time in the middle east, you have a sense that the game is starting to change.

[habernac]

a friend of mine is cycling from Egypt to South Africa and luckily, just crossed the border into the Sudan. Good timing.

[troutman]

Could they not access the internets via satellites?