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.

And yet ...

[damn_registrars]

The internet in Egypt is still easier to read than slashdot 3.0.

Re:Yup

[ocdscouter]

77% Discount Viagra, if my inbox is any indication.

Re:Egypt's got bigger problems

[Kvasio]

this isn't about getting information. It's about keeping army's hands busy with porn ... they loose porn, they eventually get off the barracks and pacify people.

Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we can take their IPv4 addresses back and postpone the depletion.
http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/delegation

They just allocated the last two /8s to APNIC, the remaining five /8s will be delegated to each one of the five regional registries. Goodbye IPv4! Nice to meet you and your brother called NAT.