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Egypt Leaves the Internet

| 43 Comments | 5 TrackBacks

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.

egypt_outages.png

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 Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers.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. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.

Update (3:06 UTC)

One of the very few exceptions to this block has been Noor Group (AS20928), which still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, with inbound transit from Telecom Italia as usual. Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address.

Its DNS A records indicate that it's normally reachable at 4 different IP addresses, only one of which belongs to Noor. Internet transit path diversity is a sign of good planning by the Stock Exchange IT staff, and it appears to have paid off in this case. Did the Egyptian government leave Noor standing so that the markets could open next week?

5 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: http://www.renesys.com/mt-cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/147

RT @ericuman Graphic showing Egypt's sudden disappearance from internet: http://jr.ly/vyck (via @jayrosen_nyu) Read More

My thoughts on the way Egypt's present situation can be related to the proposed Internet filter for Australia ... Read More

In the form of a graph: James Cowie writes: [I]n 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-op... Read More

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 fibe... Read More

How #Egypt shut down the internet there: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-internet.shtml #25jan Read More

43 Comments

as a reader, thank for the quick text.
updates on: http://storify.com/wikinews030/jan28th-in-egypt-2011

Thank you for linking to HuffPost on this.

This is unbelievable ... at this point in the game, it's like cutting off libraries, or newspapers.

Extremely valuable post, James. Thanks. Have added it to our post on Egypt, retweeted it. Hope you do indeed follow up.

Crazy. Government has too much control.

As a customer of an Egyptian ISP (cityhost.net!) I have to say I'm deeply dismayed at how quickly the government can quickly cut off my hosting service for Egypt.

Prior to today Egypt was the #1 place to do hosting for European based users, as it is so cheap, responsive, and seemingly business friendly.

Well at least the local Egyptians were.

If only their government wasn't sabotaging the economy in every way possible.

THROW THE BUMS OUT, Clearly Egypt's old government isn't good for business!!!!!!

Thank you , thank you very much for posting this , we , Egyptians living in Canada , has been trying to contact media lately to spread the news about internet cut (and also SMS service) in Egypt , we cannot reach anyone unless we call and not always get through to, they are isolated and trapped in black-hole .. This has two meanings , government wants to prevent activists from communicating like they used to on twitter to agree on locations and help each other when needed, and also prove they are planning the worse for tomorrow and wants it away from media since activists have been posting instantly pics videos and tweets live from the action.
Please keep posting!

egypt's markets, like most in the middle east, run from sunday-thursday (their weekend is friday-saturday, since the holy day of rest in islam is friday).

so the markets will not open tomorrow either way. this is likely a measure to keep international investors from totally panicking.

Great job as always, this is an amazing story. I can't believe the government is so self interested as to completely undermine their country's businesses by doing this.

Markets are closed on Friday (Muslim day of rest/mosque prayer, etc). And also Sat., they open on Sunday in Egypt... So I highly doubt that Noor ISP was left open for Stock Market purposes. It's more likely that their domestic spy/security services and related agencies are keeping themselves on the grid via this ISP.

Very important work you're doing here.Long live the Agyptians!

This could be an own goal!

How can we benefit from this? can people inside the country connect to this (Noor) network in any means?

noor is smallest of the ISPs so maybe they decided leaving them running won't change much.

I'm guessing blackout is an attempt to disrupt protesters and activists ability to coordinate not to prevent information from leaking out (afterall journalists are still allowed to operate)

LOL, adios and good riddance.

www.privacy-tools.au.tc

Unfortunately this is not unprecedented. During Army imposed "State of Emergency" in Bangladesh (pop. 160 million+) in 2007 internet and mobile connections turned-off for over 24 hours.

Only one fibre-optic cable connected Bangladesh to net and it was simply disabled.

Terrifying experience trying to get information on police and army actions to outside world then.

Looks like egyptse.com is down now too - 03.46 GMT

4chan will deal with internet kill-switch,
most police now side with the street,
2 hours to go

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not Forgive.
We do not Forget.
Expect us.

I suspect the cut off of all these services (Net, landlines,cells, power, water -if true) IS multipurpose - Disrupt protest communications to coordinate - protect (balloon theory) AND instill FEAR .. Notice the fear of non-witnessed massacres on some tweets?
Can some of these be plants? Scare people (earlier) from going out on Friday ?

The loss of internet-enabled access to information is atrocious, but even worse may be the impact on their economy due to the shutting down of a large portion of commerce and trade.

Joe Lieberman's wet dream of an "internet kill switch" comes to fruition in Egypt.

Friday is a holiday/weekend in Egypt.

Thank You for writing about this. We, Egyptians outside of Egypt, are really worried about this. Our hearts are with the people at home. Down with this regime.

Update: international calls seems to work.

Heh, they even shut off their own governmental website. I just checked. Note to governments, if you want to chop off the internet, make sure you have a portion left working for your own purposes.

Thank you for metering and this post :) Just linked to it from my german blog.

Anonymous | January 27, 2011 10:57 PM | Reply
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not Forgive.
We do not Forget.
Expect us.

---------------

This comment makes me feel so much better about this, something is being planned - and I hope to god that they do something to help us all get this to STOP.

Mohamed Baradei placed under house arrest according to israeli intelligence

They [corrupt government] tried to steal everyone's Facebook credentials, and when it became obvious they weren't going to be able to "co-opt" technology for their own uses, they decided to go scorched Earth.

20th Century thinking for a 21st Century world.

my word, is this real? has anyone protested this? CAN any company protest this? how long is this for?

holy crap. thats a really bold move, and a great way to cripple your nation.

What cracks me up about this, in a really sad way, is what do they think they will accomplish with this, in terms of suppressed information? Maybe there will be a delay, but cameras and videocameras and cell phones will still capture everything and eventually it will get out and be posted everywhere.

Sigh.. 3 dedicated servers cut off from my clients... complete disaster.

egyptse.com is loading, but very, very, very slowly.

Some more routes are up at this point. See: http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450 (the article has been updated since the original post)

Anybody in Egypt got a Winlink connection on HF?

Anybody got a Winlink connection on HF to Egypt?

Gov site's downtime is probably the result of DDoS attacks and not an intentional shutdown.

Also, an interesting side-note: http://www.noor.net/Clients.aspx

Notice the absolutely staggering number of high-end clients that exist on the one and only remaining ISP in Egypt at the moment...

...coincidence?

They need to at least give people access to porn or they will really revolt! This is sad and stupid. It seems that all .gov.eg websites are all down as well.

egyptse.com running fine, maybe a little slow. Looks like all three of their major indices bottomed out around the same time today/yesterday.

if they have modems could someone txt/sms them the numbers to call (international calls?) for dialup access. or phone & tell them if SMS is down too.

The Egyptian government runs the risk of angering business owners and private institutions on top of the existing number of protesters. Not a good political move. This just puts under global scrutiny.

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This page contains a single entry by James Cowie published on January 27, 2011 7:56 PM.

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