Hi! I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned on this thread the actual method which was used to disable the Internet in Egypt, even though it was widely reported and relatively well understood. So here goes. :-)
The global routing announcements for Egyptian net-blocks were simply withdrawn by the Egyptian ISPs. Here is one of many articles explaining this: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3258743/how-egypt-pulled-the-internet-plug/ Note that this is not speculation, this was clearly visible to network administrators outside Egypt, as documented here: http://stat.ripe.net/egypt/ If this was the only action taken, and assuming Egyptian ISPs have peering arrangements amongst themselves, then the local Egyptian Internet should have worked just fine, aside from the fact that DNS is a globally shared system and DNS resolution would have quickly become unreliable due to a lack of access to the global root servers (unless they have global roots in Egypt, which I do not know, but find unlikely). So p2p communication systems which avoid dependency on global DNS could well have worked just fine within the country, at least this time. Hope this sheds some light! One thing which I do idly wonder about, is whether some foolhardy admins with access to backbone infrastructure could have re-announced the withdrawn roots and thereby switched Egypt's Internet back on from outside. This probably wouldn't have lasted long, as the Egyptian ISPs could of course have responded by unplugging some cables or physically powering devices down, but it's an interesting question none the less. Cheers! -- Bjarni R. Einarsson The Beanstalks Project ehf. Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
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