Egypt Goes Dark As Last ISP Pulls Plug

CWmike writes "Egypt is now off the grid. Four days after the Egyptian government ordered Internet service providers to disconnect from the Internet, the country's last working Internet company has abruptly vanished from cyberspace. Noor Group, a small service provider that hosted Internet connections for the country's stock exchange and other businesses, became completely unreachable at around 10:46 p.m. Cairo time (Eastern European Time), according to Earl Zmijewski, general manager with Internet monitoring company Renesys. 'It looks like they're completely lights-out now,' he told IDG News' Robert McMillan. Thought to handle only about 8 percent of the country's Internet connections, Noor had served as a critical lifeline to Egypt since the government had ordered service cut early Friday morning. Nobody is sure how Noor was able to keep operating, even as larger ISPs such as Vodafone and Telecom Egypt voluntarily cut their Egyptian networks off from the rest of the world." To help with this, engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow have rolled out a "speak-to-tweet" service, which lets people dial in to an international phone number, leave a voice mail, and have the audio file made available online via an automated Twitter update.

Comments

Good-by financial markets????

[l0ungeb0y]

Wow, Egypt's "Presidente" should an hero right the fuck now.

The people have spoken, and he's sitting there, firing his cabinet, cutting of all ties to the outside world and has now officially brought whatever international market trade still existed to a standstill.

All so he can cling to whatever notion of power he thinks he still has. The UN should be let in, and allowed to safe-guard the places of government while a democratic election is quickly assembled. There's too much risk at this point of the military just up and saying "fuck it" and having a junta.