Egyptian Internet service providers have returned to the Web, ending almost a week of down time ordered by the Egyptian government.
Internet monitoring firm Renesys said in a blog post that Internet service was restored around 11:29am Cairo time today. Web sites for the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt, MCDR, and the U.S. Embassy in Cairo are once again reachable.
The major ISPs - Telecom Egypt, Raya/Vodafone, Link Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and Internet Egypt - have restored service. Ironically, Noor Group, which was able to maintain service in the country until Monday - was the last ISP to come back online, around 12:52pm, according to Renesys.
"The rebooted Egyptian [global routing] 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)," wrote Renesys's James Cowie. "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."
Cowie said the transition wasn't entirely smooth; it took awhile for networks belonging to the Egyptian Universities Network to come back online. Renesys did confirm, however, that Facebook and Twitter are available in Egypt.
"No traffic blocks are in place, DNS answers are clean, IP addresses match, no funny business. For now," Cowie wrote.
Internet service in Egypt went dark on Thursday night amidst protests regarding the country's economic policies, government corruption, and the nearly 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
In a translated statement aired on Al Jazeera Friday afternoon, Mubarak said there is a "fine line between freedom and chaos, and while I take the side of citizens' freedom to express their views, I also similarly adhere to defending Egypt's stability and security, and not to steer it into any threats that may jeopardize public safety, [where the] reprecussions on the current and future of Internet is unpredictable."
At the time, Mubarak ordered the existing government to step down and said he would name a new government on Saturday. He has since said he will not seek re-election in the fall but will remain in power until then.
In the wake of the Internet outage, Google and SayNow, a startup Google acquired last week, teamed up to allow tweeting by phone, with an ear toward those on the ground in Egypt. Google.org also has a Crisis Response page with resources about the ongoing trouble in the region. The French Data Network (FDN) also provided those with landlines access to dial-up networks.
Renesys, meanwhile, put together a video (below) that illustrates the minute-by-minute departure of Egypt's service providers from the global routing table on Friday. "With each white flash, a new network has been withdrawn from the routing table, leaving a new set of Egyptian customers without Internet. The country fades nearly to black in less than 30 minutes," Cowie wrote.