Egyptian Internet And Mobile Phone Outage Continues
Experts said on Saturday that the scale of Egypt’s crackdown on the Internet and mobile phones amid deadly protests against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak is unprecedented in the history of the web.
President Barack Obama, social networking sites and rights groups throughout the world condemned the moves by Egyptian authorities to stop activists from using cellphones and technology to organize rallies.
"It’s a first in the history of the Internet," Rik Ferguson, an expert for Trend Micro, the world’s third biggest computer security firm, told AFP.
Julien Coulon, co-founder of French Internet performance monitoring and traffic management system Cedexis, told AFP:Â "In 24 hours we have lost 97 percent of Egyptian Internet traffic."
U.S. Internet monitoring company Renesys said that Egypt’s four main Internet service providers cut off international access to their customers in a near simultaneous move on Thursday.
According to official figures, about 23 million Egyptians have either regular or occasional Internet access.
"In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet," James Cowie of Renesys said in a blog post.
Cowie said that one exception to the Internet providers off air was the Noor Group, which still has 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers.
He said in a post that it was not clear why the Noor Group was unaffected "but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange is still alive at a Noor address."
Mobile phone networks were also disrupted in the country on Friday, facing patchy signals and inoperative text message services.
Vodafone said all mobile phone companies in Egypt had been "instructed" Friday to suspend services in some areas during the unrest, adding that under Egyptian law it was "obliged" to comply with the order.
Egyptian operator ECMS, linked to France’s Telecom-Orange, said that the authorities ordered them to shut them off late Thursday.
"We had no warning, it was quite sudden," a spokesman for Telecom-Orange told AFP in France.
Experts said that the shutdown in Egypt is the most comprehensive official electronic blackout of its kind.
Links to the web were cut off for a few days during the protests against Myanmar’s ruling military junta in 2007.
Egypt is on the list of 13 countries classed as "enemies of the Internet" by media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
"So far there has been no systematic filtering by Egyptian authorities — they have completely controlled the whole Internet," Soazig Dollet, the Middle East and North Africa specialist for RSF, said in a statement.
Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Cairo should restore the Internet and social networking sites.
Facebook and Twitter also shared their thoughts.
"Although the turmoil in Egypt is a matter for the Egyptian people and their government to resolve, limiting Internet access for millions of people is a matter of concern for the global community," said Andrew Noyes, a Facebook spokesman.
Twitter said in a statement: "We believe that the open exchange of info & views benefits societies & helps govts better connect w/ their people."
U.S. digital rights groups also criticized the Egyptian government.
"This action is inconsistent with all international human rights norms, and is unprecedented in Internet history," Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology in the United States, said in a statement.
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