The situation in Egypt now seems to have taken a new turn. First, it was Twitter, Facebook followed shortly after and now it’s the whole Internet communication. After the hack attack launched on their websites yesterday, the government has now cut off internet access and mobile coverage in the country.
Customers of Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr are suffering from a massive Internet and SMS blackout. The orchestrated plug-pulling happened around 12.30 am (Egypt time) and our system immediately detected the blockage of the government sites.
According to a BGPMon report as much as 88 percent of the traffic was successfully shut down leaving the country without external communications. Still, as Mashable reports, mostly on-the-ground news outlets have still found ways to upload images and videos of the escalating violence that is shaking the nation all over.
The government is facing its hardest test today as mass protests are expected all over the country after Friday prayer and the Egyptian army now patrols the streets of Cairo with armored personnel carriers, CNN reports.
We will continue to follow the situation closely.
To see how the Internet blackout looks like, you can find an interesting graph here - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/28/this-is-what-egypts-cutoff-from-the-net-looks-like_n_815335.html.
