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Egypt Internet Restored; Cairo Protests Turn Violent

Internet access in Egypt was restored Wednesday as protests turned violent in the capital, a day after president Hosni Mubarak said he would not step down immediately and as pro-government demonstrators, some on horseback and camels, took to the streets and challenged opponents of the regime. Renesys, the internet-monitoring service which first reported that Egypt’s […]
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Supporters of President Hosni Mubarak, riding camels and horses, fight with anti-Mubarak protesters in Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011. Several thousand supporters of President Hosni Mubarak, including some riding horses and camels and wielding whips, clashed with anti-government protesters Wednesday as Egypt's upheaval took a dangerous new turn. (AP Photo/Mohammed Abou Zaid)

Internet access in Egypt was restored Wednesday as protests turned violent in the capital, a day after president Hosni Mubarak said he would not step down immediately and as pro-government demonstrators, some on horseback and camels, took to the streets and challenged opponents of the regime.
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Renesys, the internet-monitoring service which first reported that Egypt's internet had effectively been cut last Friday, reported that it had largely been restored at 11:34 a.m. local time -- 5:34 a.m. EST.

"Egyptian Internet providers returned to the Internet at 09:29:31 UTC (11:29am Cairo time). Websites such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt, MCDR, and the US Embassy in Cairo, are once again reachable," James Cowie of Renesys said in a blog post.

"All major Egyptian ISPs appear to have readvertised routes to their domestic customer networks in the global routing table...The rebooted Egyptian table is smaller than it was a week ago, but that's mostly because of a normal process called "reaggregation" (the deletion of very small, specific customer routes that are partially or totally redundant with existing announcements, generally for purposes of traffic engineering). That's to be expected: the Egyptian table had gotten pretty dense with redundancy in the week leading up to the takedown, and it's been cleaned up in the process of being brought back.

"It wasn't totally smooth; a few larger network blocks belonging to the Egyptian Universities Network (AS2561) were still missing. Unfortunately, these included the address space that hosts the .eg top level domain servers. The routes have since recovered."

Egypt's internet clampdown last Friday came just as street protests were poised to ramp up in a "Day of Rage." Despite the aggressive tone and some looting, protests through the weekend — though heavy on property damage, especially to government and ruling-party installations — were not marked by significant clashes with the military. Dozens, however, were killed.

With the restoration of access, Twitter lit up from the scene. Among those in tweeting from Tahrir Square are Pulitzer-prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof), who just sent this series of messages via the web:

In my part of Tahrir, pro-#Mubarak mobs arrived in buses, armed with machetes, straight-razors and clubs, very menacing.

I saw some people who were motionless and seemed badly injured. Hard to know casualties, but they're adding up.

Pro-#Mubarak thugs at #Tahrir v hostile to journalists. Several journalists attacked. I was threatened but am fine.

Pro-Mubarak thugs everywhere have same talking points, same signs, same hostility to journalists. An organized crackdown.

I tried to interview a young woman who was surrounded and bullied by Mubarak's thugs. She stood her ground.heroically.

Then the mob prevented me from talking to her, and she slipped away. It's #Mubarak thugocracy on #Tahrir.

Egypt's reason for cutting off the internet, and to tamp down mobile networks, seemed obvious: to complicate the ability of the protesters to organize. Clearly, that was not effective. The government's reason for restoring the internet is not as clear, even as Mubarak takes a more-defiant tone and as the uprising, and the government's response to it, is playing out on live TV.

It's possible, of course, that restoring internet access (whose absence did nothing to quell the uprising anyway) is part of a larger effort to appear accommodating in the face of confrontations, which journalists on the scene report seem trumped up with the sudden, coincidental appearance of armed pro-Mubarak partisans.

Josh Leffler, a 25-year-old student attending the American University in Cairo, who has participated in the protests for the past three days, said he believes the restoration of internet access just as the protests turned violent for the first time was not a coincidence. "This is obviously an extremely clever way of trying to manipulate the flow of information to reflect poorly on the protesters," he wrote in an e-mail to Wired, in which he also confirmed internet access has been restored in Cairo.

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