After almost a week without Internet access, Egypt blinked back online Wednesday, according to report published by Renesys.
As of one PM Wednesday, Cairo time, the country's main Internet Service Providers (ISPs) appear to have restored their service, providing Net access to the strife torn middle eastern nation.Â
Internet service was initially shut down last Thursday in a coordinated fashion that severed the nation from the Internet in the space of minutes. The mass outage, which initially impacted both cellular and IP networks, was believed to be a response to widespread unrest and protest in the nation. It has been widely speculated that Hosni Mubarak’s government demanded the black out, though there is no way to prove these allegations.
On Wednesday, all five ISPs resumed connectivity independently, but also within minutes of one another - behavior unlikely to be caused by a technical glitch. ISP the NOOR Group, which hosts the Egyptian Stock Exchange and the American University of Cairo was alone among Egyptian ISPs that kept operating after last Thursday's blackout. NOOR inexplicably remained online for a few days before being taken offline as well. Strangely enough, the NOOR Group didn’t reconnect until an hour and a half after the other ISPs.
While it has become commonplace for totalitarian regimes to block access to certain websites or areas of the Web, a country-wide Internet blackout of this magnitude is unprecedented. While Internet access has been restored, Renesys reports that there will still be consequences of the blackout that are lasting. For one: the rebooted Egyptian table is smaller than it was before the blackout due to a process called re-aggregation, whereby small and partially redundant customer routes, which serve mostly traffic engineering purposes, are lost. This could actually have positive effects, as the Egyptian table had become rife with such redundancies in the days and weeks leading up to the shut down. Some large network blocks, like that belonging to the Egyptian Universities Network, which controls Egypt’s top level .eg domains, did not immediately reappear following the reconnection.
Renesys confirmed that Twitter and Facebook, the social media giants that have come to be the mouthpiece of the people in this and other similar revolutions, are once again accessible in Egypt. As of now, in as far as Renesys can monitor, Internet traffic is returning to pre-blackout numbers, there are no known traffic blocks in place, and DNS answers are coming back clean with matching IP addresses.
Netcraft reported a significant peculiarity that has occurred since the reconnect. The website of the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology came back online briefly, but then disappeared again and the Ministry of Interior website has been spotty since the reconnection as well. Interestingly, both the MCIT and the MOI’s website had been the  target of failed DDoS attacks from online collective Anonymous, who turned the Low Ion Orbit Cannons (LOIC) on Egyptian Government sites shortly after they attempted to block Internet activity in Tahrir Square.
Via ThreatPost
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