Egypt Withdraws From The Internet

It has been confirmed that no Internet or SMS traffic is entering or leaving the country, the Internet and SMS blackout occurred just hours before major protests were planned against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.

The Egyptian service provider, Sebone, is reporting that no Internet traffic is entering or exiting the country as of 12:30am, Egyptian time. Along with the Internet blockage citizens and reporters are experiencing SMS outages aswell, leaving the useless to get the information out of the country.

The cause of this outage is from the government being at unrest with the community. Since the start presidency in 1981 President Hosni Mrbarak. The pot has been boiling since the start of the presidency, and has recently been in an uproar due in part to the successful revolution in Tunisia that forced their president out of power. During that revolution Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were key communication tools used by the protestors.

Taking Tunisia as an example, Egyptian protesters have used these social media tool to organize their protests, using hashtags to communicate such as #Jan25. Egypt’s response to these protest attempts is blocking the Internet. For the moment, Egyptian police have kept protestors at bay with water cannons and tear gas.

Some of the most experienced reporters are predicting that this Internet blockage is just the start of what the government has in store for the predicted protest date.