Cutting off Egypt’s internet has perhaps drawn more attention to Mubarak’s crisis

MY COLLEAGUE Mohamed Abdel Dayem, was the first to mail. “Just a second ago,” he wrote, “about 10 contacts of mine all disappeared off instant messaging in unison. That cannot be a coincidence.”

That was on Thursday, January 27th, at 5.34pm New York time.

A stream of similar e-mails followed. Everyone I knew who had online friends in Egypt had lost contact with them. On the wider internet, the Twitter streams and Facebook updates from Egyptian journalists, bloggers and others, which had been overwhelming us with their messages since the first protests on January 25th, all suddenly gone quiet.

Could it be a coincidence? Internet connectivity disappears all the time, for many reasons, almost always accidental. Sometimes it’s a cut optical fibre – a ship might drag its anchor over a submarine cable. It can be very difficult to determine the true extent or origins of any online disruption.

To find out what was really going on, I posted a message to a mailing list where many administrators of the American corner of the internet discuss day-to-day operations. Were they all seeing a similar drop-off in connectivity to Egypt?

At first, the replies were equally anecdotal: someone with a server in Cairo could no longer access it; attempts to reach prominent Egyptian websites were failing.

Finally, Andree Tonk at BGPMon, an internet routing monitoring organisation, provided the first concrete evidence of an Egypt-wide shutdown.

In order to direct traffic across the internet, a large number of key machines across the net maintain, among themselves, a global index of routes. Think of it as a constantly-updated roadmap of how to get from one part of the internet to another. The protocol these machines use to share their knowledge is called BGP – border gateway protocol.

At about 10.28pm GMT, Tonk, who monitors such BGP route tables, had noted that the routes to almost all of Egypt’s share of the internet began to be deleted from this global index. Egypt went from having 2,903 networks connected to the wider internet, routed over 52 ISPs, to only 327, via only 26 remaining ISPs.

Either because of a physical break in communications, or through a deliberate act by Egyptian ISPs, Egypt was vanishing from the internet’s map of itself.

Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist of Arbor networks, a company that makes some of the internet’s most widely-used traffic-monitoring software, quickly uploaded a graph of what his engineering teams were seeing from sites all around the world.

Labovitz’s graph showed a cliff.

“You can see,” he wrote, “that traffic plummeting to a handful of megabits after the withdrawal of most Egyptian ISP ... routes.”

Both Labovitz and Tonk’s analysis showed that not everything was down in Egypt. The rest of my evening was spent working with others to try and find out what was up, and why.

The main network completely unaffected by the early lockdown was the systems run by the Egyptian ISP, the Noor Group. There was some early speculation that this was because the Egyptian stock exchange was hosted on that network, leading to an online rumour that the service was being kept up to maintain government services.

Actually, Egypt’s stock exchange was, like any high- availability website, hosted on multiple redundant internet connections, including Noor. Noor also offered a DSL service to many ordinary Egyptians, which some journalists had been using to communicate.

Noor stayed up until almost the last day of Egypt’s exodus from the net.

This Tuesday, after the new government minister said on Egyptian state TV that cutting off the internet had been “personally painful”, it was restored.

What had cutting Egypt off achieved for President Hosni Mubarak? Very little in terms of reducing wider coverage. Most of the world saw the Egyptian protests the same way as any other major protest, through television news and paper reports.

If anything, the sheer novelty and extremism of chopping off the economic and communication lifelines of a modern Arab state drew more attention to Mubarak’s crisis.

Those communicating on the ground in Egypt had certainly been motivated and outraged by Facebook group members, in their hundreds of thousands, sharing video of police violence.

I’m not sure you could call the internet a central system for planning and operating the protests themselves, once they had reached critical mass.

Far more damaging to that kind of co-ordination was the disabling of SMS text messages and local mobile phone blocking near the protests.

Even for those using the net to communicate and understand what was going on, the blockade merely magnified the few voices that managed to emerge.

Protesters with foreign SIM cards in their phones had data access. Noor customers shared their connections. Volunteer geeks abroad even offered connected dusty old dial-up modems for Egyptians to dial into and use over the still running landlines.

Few people can really understand a foreign country and its tribulations en masse; the magnetism of social networks in these times is that you can follow, interact with and identify with a few.

As long as one Egyptian protester had internet access, the world stood ready to listen.