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Egyptian government restores Internet after five-day blackout
For the rest of Egypt, the Internet outage lasted five days. Websites such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt, MCDR, and the US Embassy in Cairo, are once again reachable. As of 15:36 Cairo time, Facebook and Twitter are once again available inside Egypt; there are no traffic blocks in place, DNS answers are clean, and IP addresses match.
The Egyptian government's goal was to kill all media coverage of the huge protests challenging President Hosni Mubarak's three decade long rule. Yesterday, Mubarak announced he would not run in the next election, though he said that was his plan all along. He still expects to remain in power until then.
The Internet blackout in Egypt started with Twitter being blocked, then Facebook stopped working, and finally the Internet was cut off completely. The reaction around the world was huge: demonstrators showed their support for Egyptians from all over. Google, Twitter and SayNow developed a "speak-to-tweet" service that let anyone send messages over Twitter without an Internet connection. YouTube started highlighting Egyptian protest footage. Even China noticed, and began censoring the word "Egypt" on the Internet.
Service to the World Wide Web may have been restored in the country but somehow, we don't think the protests are over quite just yet.
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User Comments (7)
Post a comment|
Guest
on February 2, 2011 10:22 AM |
Welcome back Egyptian Techspot fans! |
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WildEast
on February 2, 2011 10:35 AM |
As an Egyptian myself, aside from carrying a weapon to defend the street, going into loads of protesters and fearing the future, disabling the internet was the worst thing ever :| |
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fpsgamerJR62
on February 2, 2011 11:18 AM |
I'm not surprised that cutting off access to the internet didn't work out as well as the Egyptian government hoped. People have always found a way to communicate with each other long before the advent of the internet and its associated technologies. |
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mattfrompa
on February 2, 2011 12:13 PM |
I love Conan's thoughts on the outage |
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gwailo247
on February 2, 2011 12:16 PM |
fpsgamerJR62 said: I'm not surprised that cutting off access to the internet didn't work out as well as the Egyptian government hoped. People have always found a way to communicate with each other long before the advent of the internet and its associated technologies. I especially liked it how various tech companies banded together in order to give Egyptians the means to get information out, or featured news from that area to let the rest of the world know what is happening. I just hope that whatever changes happen help the country progress further into the global community, rather than devolve like Iran. |
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matrix86
on February 2, 2011 12:51 PM |
mattfrompa said: I love Conan's thoughts on the outage ++ |
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aj_the_kidd
on February 2, 2011 8:24 PM |
The Egyptian government's goal was to kill all media coverage of the huge protests challenging President Hosni Mubarak's three decade long rule Its funny how blocking the internet actually increased media coverage, now that's an EPIC FAIL That Conan pic was a classic, hell I'd probably be more focused on working right now if it wasn't for the internet |
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