Egyptian authorities 'shut down' the Internet, suspend mobile services

2011-01-28 21:07:14 GMT+7 (ICT)

CAIRO (BNO NEWS) -- Egyptian authorities on Friday basically 'shut down' the Internet inside the African country and suspended all mobile services, companies said, as anti-government protests continued.

Popular social networking website Facebook was among the first to report a sudden drop of Internet activity from Egypt. "We are aware of reports of disruption to service and have seen a drop in traffic from Egypt this morning," a spokeswoman said.

Many websites based in Egypt were unavailable on early Friday in what is described to be an action 'unprecedented' in Internet history. Reports said the Egyptian government had ordered Internet service providers to shut down connection to the Internet, except the Noor Group which continued to offer Internet services to its customers.

It was not immediately clear why Noor Group was not ordered to suspend their services, although some reports said the Egyptian Stock Exchange was using the Internet service provider.

Also mobile services were suspended in the wake of massive, anti-government protests. "All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas," a spokesperson for Vodafone said. "Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it. The Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course."

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Egyptian authorities 'shut down' the Internet

Does this mean no more Internet pyramid schemes..?

The news from Egypt, along with a Reuters article, which shows how easy it is for a country to shut off internet amd mobile communication services internally. From what I understand, Egypt is leaving an open access for banking and the stock market. All other access, including email access, has been shut off. Part of that is that Egypt doesn't really have many domestic ISPs.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/28/us-egypt-internet-analysis-idUSTRE70R35S20110128

It got me to thinking, how many ISPs are there in Thailand? Not that it's a great concern, but it doesn't hurt to at least be aware and plan ahead for any unexpected interruption if such an extensive situation ever did occur.

From the official Google blog:

Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

1/31/2011 02:27:00 PM

Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa