Egypt Steps Off The Internet

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 Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers.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


"It took just 13 minutes to wipe 80 million Egyptians off the Internet.
As the protests against authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year regime widened this week, the Egyptian government took the unprecedented step of ordering virtually all the country’s Internet service providers to shut down all connections, taking the country’s citizens and institutions off the digital map."
-Globe & Mail