Egypt Disconnected from Internet Access

By Justin Lee, January 28, 2011

A graph taken from Renesys' website which shows Egypt's sudden Internet downtime

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Egypt's Internet access was completely cut just after midnight Friday morning, according to a report by the Associated Press.

Internet security firm Renesys reported that Egypt's four main ISPs - Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr -- all went offline, almost simultaneously, around 12:34 a.m. Friday.
More than 88 percent of Egyptian networks were inaccessible as of early Friday morning, local time, according to Internet traffic monitoring firm BGPmon.
The incident comes at a time when thousands of civilians have taken to the streets to protest against President Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30-year rule.
Many industry experts are surprised that a country with a thriving Internet economy has been able to completely remove itself from the Internet in an attempt to put an end to an overwhelming opposition.
But according to Jim Cowie, the CTO and a co-founder of Renesys, it would be impossible for a similar situation to happen in the United States because the US has significantly more ISPs and connection points to the Internet.
As a result, organizing a simultaneous shutdown of the Internet would too difficult a task.
"It can't happen here," said Cowie. "How many people would you have to call to shut down the US Internet? Hundreds, thousands maybe? We have enough Internet here that we can have our own Internet. If you cut it off, that leads to a philosophical question: Who got cut off from the Internet, us or the rest of the world?"
Experts said that there aren't many countries in the world that maintain all their central Internet connections in a single location or few enough locations that they can be simultaneously shut off.
The massive Internet outage has proved just how strong of a hold Egypt has over its ISPs to have the ability to cut off the country's Internet access all at once.
Other governments have previously censored and restricted Internet access to silence protests.
Last year China drew attention when it said it would censor Google search results in the country. And in 2009, Iran disrupted Internet service to prevent active protests over its controversial elections.
But unlike these cases, Internet access throughout the entire country was disabled in what appeared to be a coordinated move, accecting all devices including mobile phones to laptops.

Article Source : http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ permits republishing here
repblished at http://webhostingdomainblognews.blogspot.com/
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Click Most Updated Discount Coupon Codes & My Personal Web Hosting Recommendations if you are interested in those.
Stay Tuned!
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<