Quelle surprise !!!: The Internet goes down in Egypt

[marmar]

Reports are emerging that Internet has gone down in Cairo and perhaps throughout Egypt, only hours before the largest planned protests yet.

According to a report from The Arabist, "Egypt has shut off the internet."

Multiple Internet Service Providers are affected according to the report, which states:

I just received a call from a friend in Cairo (I won't say who it is now because he's a prominent activist) telling me neither his DSL nor his USB internet service is working. I've just checked with two other friends in different parts of Cairo and their internet is not working either.

The news of the Internet outage came minutes after the Associated Press published a video of an Egyptian protestor being shot. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/27/egypt-internet-goes-down-_n_815156.html

[RKP5637]

1. Internet kill switch! Yep! n/t

[Exultant Democracy]

2. you can take away our series of tubes but you can never take away our freedom.

[somone]

3. This is why we must have the internet kill switch

:sarcasm:

[blondeatlast]

4. I can hardly wait to hear why it happened, The Saudi version of Baghdad Bob

ought to have an inspired explanation...

[Recursion]

5. SMS too (nt)

[Iterate]

6. Here is the AP Raw Video:

AP Raw Video: Man Shot in Egypt Protest
http://video.ap.org/?f=None&pid=oT7qj_wiVHTbYae3scwok4_irYjJ2R8Z

The police were ~100M away and the man was a threat to no one.

The first twitter reports that communications had been cut occurred several hours before any news reports. I suppose the news agencies were too busy to confirm it. Landlines have been cut as well and some protesters are reporting that police are starting car fires. The news will get out.