Blackout
The Egyptian government has reportedly stopped all access to the internet from within Egypt in a bid to crush the mounting political unrest.
It is believed the Egyptian government has not only blocked websites like Facebook and Twitter but that many of the biggest ISPs in the country are offline, The Guardian reported.
Andree Toonk, from monitoring site BGPmon, told the newspaper that 88 percent of the ‘Egyptian internet' is unavailable.
"What's different in this case as compared to other 'similar' cases is that all of the major ISP's seem to be almost completely offline. Whereas in other cases, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were typically blocked, in this case the government seems to be taking a shotgun approach by ordering ISPs to stop routing all networks," he reportedly added.
It is believed the blackout began late last night and that just one ISP has an active connection to outside of Egypt.
A demonstration being organized for today was expected to be the climax so far of protests against the Egyptian government, with some commentators suggesting the country might be on the brink of revolution.
Another firm that monitors internet access called Renesys, has shed more light on the situation in a blog that said: "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."
The firm said it saw an almost simultaneous ‘withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the internet's global routing table' and that around 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol routes were cut, stopping outsiders' ability to exchange internet traffic with Egypt's service providers.
It also noted that Noor Group has the only working connection and while it is unknown why it missed the blackout, Renesys said: "we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange is still alive at a Noor address."
Obviously a government bent on restricting its people's internet access and ability to communicate neither looks particularly strong or responsible to its citizens, or to the outside world. Perhaps articulating many outsiders' fears, an engineer at Google called Tim Bray tweeted: "I feel that as soon as the world can't use the net to watch, awful things will start happening."
However, a website accessible to outsiders called Access, which runs The Tor Project aims to ‘reopen channels of communication'. It is described as "a network of tunnels through which information and internet sites can be requested and passed back anonymously."
People with "a bit of technical savvy" can support the project, which Access said will: "allow the Egyptian people to connect to sites like Facebook, as the encrypted traffic will pass through your donated bandwidth, avoiding firewalls set up by the government."
