"In an historic move, Egypt has unplugged itself from the Internet. In Cairo, the Web has gone as silent as a Sphinx. Protestors who've been using Twitter, Facebook, and email to organize street demonstrations against the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak are now up the Nile without a cable modem" see here.

According to internet monitoring firm Renesys, shortly before 2300 GMT on 27 January virtually all routes to Egyptian networks were simultaneously withdrawn from the Internet's global routing table.

That meant that virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses were unreachable. More here. A plot of Internet traffic with Egypt is shown below:

From Arbor networks

From SLAC (USA)

From SLAC, using PingER, we saw Helwan University and the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science stopped responding between 23:30 26 Jan 2011 and 00:30 27 Jan 2011. The Egyptian Universities Network site was still accessible from SLAC until 23:30 28 Jan 2011, and then became inaccessible.

From NUST-SEECS (Pakistan)

Pakistan appears to also have lost connectivity to the EUN. On Jan 27, 2011 around 2200 hours, maggie1.niit.edu.pk lost connectivity to the Egypt Universities Network (EUN). On the same day around 2300 hours, maggie2.niit.edu.pk lost connectivity to EUN.

Some connectivity still available

The Library of Alexandria www.bibalex.org (196.204.161.10) appears to be alive and responsive.
GeoIPTools says it's in Egypt (but GeoIPTools get its info from databases and is not fully accurate). Ping www.bibalex.org get a DNS but the ping fails. A TCP RTT test to port 80 of www.bibalex.org gives:

round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 226.554/233.915/241.100 (std = 3.170)

Which is about right for Egypt. I wonder if it is being hosted elsewhere in the Mid East

On the other hand, the traceroute goes through London, see below and the 16th hop from the name suggest Alexandria and the 17th hop is close by.

Noor Group http://www.noor.net/ (or AS20928, is one of the major network services providers in Egypt and used by the Egyptian Stock Exchange.) still appears to be online. Reported by http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/28/how-egypt-killed-the-internet/. It might be possible that the bibalex.org site is connected via this network or any other network in Egypt that is still accessible to the outside world. See here

www.noor.net was pingable at 12:00 EST 1/30/2011.

pinger@pinger $ ping www.noor.net
PING noor.net (217.139.227.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 217.139.227.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=109 time=218 ms
64 bytes from 217.139.227.20: icmp_seq=1 ttl=109 time=216 ms
64 bytes from 217.139.227.20: icmp_seq=2 ttl=109 time=216 ms

--- noor.net ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 216.394/217.059/218.364/0.997 ms, pipe 2

I added it to the hosts we ping in Egypt on 1/30/2011.

One email to Bebo White sent  from Egypt on 1/30/2011 9:50am PST indicated that the Library of Alexandria appeared to be an outpost of Intenet connectivity in Egypt (BA refers to the Biblioteka Alexandria or Library of Alexandra):

There is no internet access in the whole country. Only in BA! I'm there now to post statement on our website bibalex.org and will leave immediately before curfew starts. Pray for us

The www.bibaex.org site has useful information on the state at the BA.

According to the PingER data, www.noor.net was no longer accessible starting after Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:30:18 GMT and before Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:00:44 GMT. At this time Monday 22:00 EST it is still inaccessable, as are all the other hosts monitored by PingER in Egypt. See here where it states that NOOR became completely unreachable at around 10:46 p.m. Cairo time (Eastern European Time).

Restoration

At 5:09 pm 2/1/2011 EST www.bibalex.org was accessible on port 80, see the synack results. The traceroute is the same as before apparently going through FLAGTEL in London. However www.noor.net was not pingable, in fact its name did not resolve.

Following the announcement that Egypt had started to restore links to the Internet, we noted that We saw www.noor.net to again be reachable sometime after 10:30:00  and before  11:00:32 Wed, 02 Feb 2011 GMT.

 frcu.eun.eg (the Egyptian Universities Network host)  became reachable/pingable from SLAC between 8:00 and 9:00am February 6th, 2011 GMT.

The National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science (NARSS) PingER monitoring host in Cairo started making PingER measurements again between 12:00noon and 1:00pm on February 8th, 2011 GMT and it could be seen from SLAC  between midnight and 1:00am February 7th, 2011 GMT.
  • No labels