The Egyptian government has ordered internet providers to shut down all international connections to the internet. Renesys, an American company that specializes in the analysis of internet data routing estimated the shut down on Friday was unprecedented in the history of internet. The four Egyptian service providers—Links Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr—are for the moment off the air. The only exception to this block is Noor Group, which still is still providing all of its 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers. The reason why Noor Group has been immune to the block is unclear, but unconfirmed reports say it is because the provider is linked to the Egyptian stock market.
Every business, bank, internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office in Egypt is now cut off from the rest of the world. The government’s shut down all internet routes has wiped the country from the global map, and all of Egypt’s internet addresses are unreachable worldwide. According to the Renesys website, the situation Egypt’s Internet is facing now is incomparable in scale to the modest manipulation that took place in Tunisia. At 12:34 AM local time, the US agency observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to the Egyptian networks in the internet’s global routine table. The agency wrote on its website that it worries about the consequences of the large-scale shut down on the credit markets and in the streets.
