Skip to main content

After 5-day blackout, Internet access in Egypt is restored

egypt-internet-access-restored-twitter-tweetAfter more than a week of violent protests and political upheaval, Egypt’s major Internet service providers brought the embattled country back online Wednesday, according to reports by the Wall Street Journal and The Next Web, as well as a deluge of first-person accounts on Twitter. The reconnection, which includes access to previously blocked sites like Twitter, comes only a day after more than a million Egyptians converged on Tahrir square in Cairo to call for President Hosni Mubarak to step down from power.

Reports that broadband access, as well as mobile and Blackberry services, had been restored began to appear online early Wednesday. Internet access monitors BGPMon and Netcraft confirmed that Egyptian websites had returned to the Web. And a tweet from Google brought further confirmation.

Related Videos

Egypt has been mostly offline since January 27, two days after protests erupted in the Middle Eastern country. Lack of broadband and mobile connections didn’t stop Egyptian dissidents from getting their message onto the Web (and out to the rest of the world) entirely, however, with many resorting to faxes, ham radio and dial-up Internet to post updates to Twitter and other online outlets. A Speak2Tweet application created by Google, which enabled people to phone-in Twitter updates, also helped protesters bypass the Internet block. Since protests began on January 25, services like Twitter and Facebook have played a central role in the Egyptian opposition movement.

With standard Internet access now available, updates from inside Egypt have been pouring onto the Web.

The restoration of Internet access is part of a broader effort by Mubarak’s government and the Egyptian military to urge citizens to return to normal life. At the time of this writing, however, “chaos” had erupted in Cairo, reports the Associated Press, as anti- and pro-Mubarak protesters clashed in a tidal wave of “uncontrolled violence” that involved assaults with bricks, firebombs and warriors riding camels. So despite the government’s wishes, it doesn’t seem as though anything resembling “normal” will happen in Egypt any time soon, regardless of how easily its citizens can publish a tweet.

Editors' Recommendations

This popular gaming laptop with an RTX 3050 Ti is surprisingly cheap
A person using the Asus TUF F15 gaming laptop.

One of the best laptop deals for gaming and is over at Best Buy. You can buy the Asus TUF Gaming A15 gaming laptop for $800 with a chunky saving of $280 compared to its usual price of $1,080. One of the best gaming laptop deals around for anyone on a budget but still keen to game, let's take a quick look at why the Asus TUF Gaming A15 gaming laptop is worth it. Remember -- it won't stay this price forever.

Why you should buy the Asus TUF Gaming A15 gaming laptop
The Asus TUF Gaming A15 gaming laptop won't rival the very best gaming laptops but that's hardly surprising at this price. What it does offer is great value for money. It has an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H processor along with 8GB of memory and 512GB of SSD storage. More memory would definitely be useful in a gaming laptop but everything else is pretty good. For the graphics card, there's an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti card which means you'll be able to play most games provided you don't mind adjusting the detail level a little with the more high-end ones. Paired with that is the laptop's 15.6-inch full HD screen with a 144Hz refresh rate. It features adaptive sync to cut down on screen tearing so you can play speedy games without an issue.

Read more
Good news — Nvidia’s RTX 4070 might not be a lost cause after all
The RTX 4070 Ti graphics card on a pink background.

We've got some tentative good news on Nvidia's upcoming RTX 4070 -- it might not be as expensive as it was originally assumed. While Moore's Law Is Dead claimed the GPU would cost at least $750, today's scoop shows that the YouTuber may have been wrong.

A new report tells us that Nvidia will set the price of the RTX 4070 to $600. That would be much more reasonable, but will the card's performance be impressive enough to make it rank well among the best GPUs in 2023?

Read more
GPT-4: how to use, new features, availability, and more
A laptop opened to the ChatGPT website.

ChatGPT-4 has officially arrived, confirming the longtime rumors around its improvements to the already incredibly impressive language skills of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

OpenAI calls it the company's "most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses." Here's everything you need to know about it, including how to use it and what it can do.
Availability

Read more