On January 27, 2011, the country of Egypt disabled the Internet for anyone within its borders. It did this in a couple of ways, both via the network (at the BGP level), as well as the name resolution (DNS) level. This means the take down not only impacted Egyptian nationals, but citizens of other countries that happened to be in Egypt during this time period, as well as anyone that was using a .eg ccTLD domain.
I don’t have a lot of time to form a well crafted post on the topic of Internet blockade at a national level – it suffices to say that I’m opposed.
Here are a couple of very interesting graphs, taken from http://stat.ripe.net/egypt
Start of the BGP withdrawal:
Re-announcement of Egyption BGP routes:
I’m glad that Egypt has decided to allow all those impacted by this outage access to the Internet once more. Welcome back .eg.
