For those that don't know, this is probably an attempt by the Egyptian government to stop the mass protests planned after Friday prayers today. Prayers are attended by MILLIONS of people every week, so the number of people protesting has the potential to eclipse what we've seen for the past two days!

Edit:

It seems arabist.net has gone down from all the traffic generated by reddit/slashdot. The author had speculated that the internet shutoff coincided with the release of a video by the AP showing a man getting shot during the protests earlier today. I figured I'd post the link here while the site is still down.

Updates:

* CNN's Ben Wedeman in Cairo, Egypt confirms that both the Internet and SMS are down. see: tweet via his UK Blackberry.
* Tor Project implies that someone was launching a DoS attack on them from Egypt before the internet was killed.
* From The Arabist's article -- "Update: It's not everywhere. A foreign journalist at the Semiramis Intercontinental hotel says he has internet access."
* From The Washington Post -- "A major service provider for Egypt, Italy-based Seabone, reported early Friday that there was no Internet traffic going into or out of the country after 12:30 a.m. local time."
* From The Arabist's article -- "Update 2: The Semiramis [hotel] uses Noor as its ISP. [...] they apparently use a dedicated fiber optic connection and a source said they did not receive any instructions."
* From The Arabist -- "[...] the phone companies have been ordered by the authorities to shut down SMS services (which has been the case for at least an hour) and Blackberry Messenging in Cairo (and perhaps elsewhere in Egypt)."
* According to the Tor Project, most of Egypt is back online? I can't find any reports confirming this outside of torproject's tweet.
* BGPmon has released a report on the state of the internet in Egypt. It is consistent with previous reports that all ISPs except for one (NOOR-AS) are completely down or barely functional. This contradicts the tweet by the torproject.
* "Renesys is reporting (update) that the Egyptian stock exchange is accessible via IP addresses owned by four different providers, one of them being the Noor group, and speculates that this may be the reason the Noor group is still online. If the Noor group is the predominant ISP in a financial district, this would tend to corroborate." -- thanks escape_goat!
* The Egyptian Stock Exchange is closed on Fridays and Saturdays, so that may not be the reason the Noor ISP is still operational. Unless the government expects the unrest to persist through the weekend!
* Network graph showing massive drop in internet traffic at 5:20pm EST, on January 27th.
* "DIAL-UP ISP IS WORKING. Noor dsl is still working in Try their Dial up numbers (0777 7770),(0777 7000) SPREAD THE WORD" -- thanks, illobo!
* 10:45 AM (3:45 AM EST) -- Arabist blogger has tweeted that mobile networks are down (at least in Cairo). Looks like the government is trying everything it can to further stifle communication before the protests begin.

Tags: Egypt shut down all internet services
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