Political unrest in Cairo has been attributed to bringing down the Online world in Egypt, amid ongoing protests against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. Newsgroup reports suggest organizers fed the conflict through posts on USENET newsgroups on other online channels.
Stopping the flow of information from within the country meant Egyptian government officials had to shut down internet access across the board. They did just that about a half-hour past midnight Friday morning, blaming the chaos on USENET and search engines such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing and Yahoo.
The Internet has been almost entirely blocked in Egypt since last Friday, which means that access to USENET services from within that country has been also interrupted. By late Friday, 93% of Egyptian networks were not reachable.
According to some reports, Egyptians have found ways to get around the shutdown. They are reaching out to the world with a mix of “old-fashioned dial-up modems and satellite Internet.” Interestingly, they have begun to login to international modem pools outside the government’s control.
The situation in Egypt is not unprecedented though. In a newsgroup post it was noted that in 2005 the government of Nepal cut off the Internet connection there, and in 2007 the Burmese government did the same in that country.
