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Egypt Internet down




Posted by F-DNS, 01-27-2011, 09:37 PM
It seems that a large section of Egypt's Internet has been cut to try to disrupt the organisation of mass rallies after Friday prayers. Also down or disrupted are SMS and Blackberry messaging.

There are still a few lines of communication open (mostly sat-phones and companies with their own fibre) but most commercial and domestic connections have been taken out.

http://azstarnet.com/business/techno...9cc1adb77.html

Posted by Badmanh, 01-27-2011, 10:33 PM
Yup, a few of our dedicated servers have lost connectivity.

Posted by kasimato, 01-27-2011, 10:37 PM
Arabs are now seeking democracy that is a good sign

Posted by SirMarcel, 01-27-2011, 10:55 PM
citynethost is down too

Posted by quantumphysics, 01-28-2011, 12:58 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by SirMarcel
citynethost is down too
http://www.potaroo.net/cgi-bin/as-report?as=as33785
- 41.215.240.0/22 Withdrawn
- 41.223.52.0/22 Withdrawn
- 196.46.188.0/22 Withdrawn

Posted by Badmanh, 01-28-2011, 01:03 AM
Does that mean they're gone?

Posted by quantumphysics, 01-28-2011, 01:06 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Badmanh
Does that mean they're gone?
I assume your physical server(s) are still online, just no connectivity - http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/...internet.shtml

Posted by Badmanh, 01-28-2011, 01:09 AM
Great.. so your country protests and you wipe the internet out.. not thinking about other buisnesses..

I wonder if they plan to restore it..

Posted by Badmanh, 01-28-2011, 01:21 AM
heh what a disaster, 3 servers down right now.

Posted by F-DNS, 01-28-2011, 06:27 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Badmanh
Great.. so your country protests and you wipe the internet out.. not thinking about other buisnesses.
It's weekend there today and tomorrow so I don't suppose they're too bothered about business connections. It's a coordinated effort to disrupt the organisation of rallies via Internet and mobile so they've just chopped everything they can.

Also arabist.net seems down, Google's webcache in Tunisia is off (they had similar riots/rallies on Tuesday and there's a lot of Tunisian flags being waved in Cairo) and even http://cairo.usembassy.gov is unreachable.

My guess is they'll turn the 'net back on Sunday morning so that businesses can trade. Meantime, spare a thought for the people on the streets - I'm not looking forward to the TV pictures later today

Posted by humawebdesign, 01-28-2011, 07:06 AM
what is the reason of egypt's server down? Is that decision taken by government? or its a technical problem.

Posted by Negizmo, 01-28-2011, 07:09 AM
I believe it is only DNS servers in Egypt that are down, so using Google Public DNS for example should help -- on their end, that is.

Not sure about that.

Posted by F-DNS, 01-28-2011, 07:39 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by weboutloud-Chris
I believe it is only DNS servers in Egypt that are down, so using Google Public DNS for example should help -- on their end, that is.
Errr not so. If you try a tracert to an IP in Cairo you get nowhere. They've stopped announcing the IPs over most networks - Nothing to do with DNS.

@humawebdesign It's a government intervention - Nothing to do with any technical issue.

Posted by dotHostel, 01-28-2011, 08:05 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Badmanh
Great.. so your country protests and you wipe the internet out.. not thinking about other buisnesses.
SourceForge.net banned Sudan, Syria, Cuba, Iran and North Korea

SourceForge.net > Blog

Quote:
Clarifying SourceForge.net’s denial of site access for certain persons in accordance with US law

Posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 by leeschlesinger
Category: General

If you follow @sourceforge on Twitter, you may have seen some tweets last week from certain users outside the US complaining that they no longer had access to SourceForge.net. Here’s why.

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

As one of the first companies to promote the adoption and distribution of free and open source software, and one that still puts open source at the center of its corporate ideals, restrictions on the free flow of information rub us the wrong way. However, in addition to participating in the open source community, we also live in the real world, and are governed by the laws of the country in which we are located. Our need to follow those laws supersedes any wishes we might have to make our community as inclusive as possible. The possible penalties for violating these restrictions include fines and imprisonment. Other hosting companies based in the US have similar legal and technical restrictions in place.

We regret deeply that these sanctions may impact individuals who have no malicious intent along with those whom the rules are designed to punish. However, until either the designated governments alter the practices that got them on the sanctions list, or the US government’s policies change, the situation must remain as it is.
As posted in that blog, "Most of these projects are got contributions from people around the world including people from these countries" ...

Posted by F-DNS, 01-28-2011, 09:15 AM
Vodafone have confirmed that the government told them to take certain services down ...

From Associated Press:

Quote:
The Egyptian government ordered all mobile telephone operators to suspend services "in selected areas" of the country, telecommunications company Vodafone said Friday.

In a statement, the company said "under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it."

Britain-based Vodafone Group PLC is one of the largest mobile phone operator in Egypt, with more than 25 million subscribers. It said Egyptian authorities "will be clarifying the situation in due course."

Posted by quantumphysics, 01-28-2011, 10:37 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by F-DNS
Vodafone have confirmed that the government told them to take certain services down ...

From Associated Press:
e: It looks like some places are back online, but it appears to be high end clients ( http://www.noor.net/Clients.aspx ) and universities and other stuff like that

Posted by freethought, 01-28-2011, 10:42 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by quantumphysics
e: It looks like some places are back online, but it appears to be high end clients ( http://www.noor.net/Clients.aspx ) and universities and other stuff like that
According to the Renesys article, Noor weren't affected initially. Did they go down after that was posted?

Quote:
Originally Posted by http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-internet.shtml
One of the very few exceptions to this block has been Noor Group (AS20928), which still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, with inbound transit from Telecom Italia as usual. Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address.

Posted by SirMarcel, 01-28-2011, 11:01 AM
no they werent

Posted by Jake Goddard, 01-28-2011, 11:02 AM
I think they have turned it off via border gateway control.

There is nothing anyone can do in the present moment.
Good luck getting your servers back online.

Posted by freethought, 01-28-2011, 11:17 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jake Goddard
I think they have turned it off via border gateway control.

There is nothing anyone can do in the present moment.
Good luck getting your servers back online.
The Renesys article at http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/...internet.shtml documents how they saw around 3500 BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes withdrawn almost simultaneously.

Posted by dave - just199, 01-28-2011, 02:25 PM
I imagine people might actually die over this because they can't call for emergency services

Posted by JSCL, 01-28-2011, 02:29 PM
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/ - Military killing their own people.

It's disgusting.

Posted by Patrick, 01-28-2011, 03:00 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave - Just199
I imagine people might actually die over this because they can't call for emergency services
Their 'Government' doesn't care...

Posted by dotHostel, 01-29-2011, 09:10 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Badmanh
Great.. so your country protests and you wipe the internet out.. not thinking about other buisnesses..
well ... I just did read this

Quote:
Earlier this month, the web hosting provider GoDaddy threatened the Pakistani website PakNationalists with the removal of the entire website if they did not take down an article dealing with a former CIA agent in Pakistan. The owners of the website were given the choice of either removing the controversial content or finding another Web hosting provider. The decision also had to be made in 48 hours, and there was no appealing it.

The article in question dealt with the issue of whether Jonathan Banks, a former CIA Islamabad station chief, would be tried in court for allegedly organizing illegal drone attacks on some areas of Pakistan. Due to the fact that Banks entered Pakistan on a business visa and not a diplomatic one, he did not have diplomatic immunity and could therefore be tried in a Pakistani court. The CIA removed Banks from Pakistan after he received several death threats. The PakNationalists website decided to remove the article, though it is still accessible through Google Cache.

This story was also covered by most of the large news agencies throughout the world, yet GoDaddy only ordered the Pakistani website to take the content down. It is not clear who complained and alerted GoDaddy to the controversial content, which led to its removal, though, as Gulpari Nazish Mehsud, a PakNationalists volunteer, put it, “it doesn’t take a genius to guess who is making the complaint.”

http://www.webhostingnews.biz/godadd...i-website.html

Posted by quantumphysics, 01-31-2011, 09:34 PM
noor no longer announcing anything

http://www.potaroo.net/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS20928

Posted by F-DNS, 02-02-2011, 06:11 AM
Our monitoring just showed CityNetHost in Cairo coming back online. Connection is still a little up-and-down but it's looking promising

Posted by dotHostel, 02-02-2011, 06:23 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by F-DNS
Our monitoring just showed CityNetHost in Cairo coming back online. Connection is still a little up-and-down but it's looking promising
Our Web server there registers the first access occurred 02/Feb/2011 12:54:10 +0300

PS: Last access registered before the cut-off: 28/Jan/2011 01:30:21 +0300

Posted by freethought, 02-02-2011, 06:33 AM
Just checked our BGP feeds in the UK and we're now seeing routes for CityNetHost's AS33785 via AS24863 (Link.net Egypt).

We are also seeing routes from other Egyption ISPs mentioned in the Renesys articles - AS8452 (Telecom Egypt), AS24835 (Raya), AS32992 (Etisalat Misr) and AS5536 (Internet Egypt) at a quick glance.

We aren't seeing anything for AS20928 (Noor Group) at the moment.

The first route announcement for 41.215.240.0/22 from AS33785 looks to have been at about 09:48 UK time.

Posted by freethought, 02-02-2011, 07:13 AM
Looks like the Noor Group AS20928 came back at about 10:50 UK time.

Posted by dotHostel, 02-02-2011, 11:40 AM
This blog post shows the return of the Egyptian Internet providers:

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/02/...internet.shtml

Posted by mtalaat, 02-02-2011, 05:04 PM
Sorry for the interruption of service due to political events in Egypt - the service is fully operational now.

Our revolution still in progress.

Posted by mtalaat, 02-02-2011, 05:08 PM
Sorry for the interruption of service due to political events in Egypt, the service is fully operational now.
Our revolution still in progress.

Posted by Badmanh, 02-02-2011, 11:42 PM
Hmm still alot of packet loss, %40-50%

Posted by windywinter, 02-03-2011, 08:57 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Badmanh
Hmm still alot of packet loss, %40-50%
It takes weeks to get a network back to normal.

Posted by ObjectZone, 02-03-2011, 11:14 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by windywinter
It takes weeks to get a network back to normal.
Weeks huh? Is that why no packet loss today? 1 day = n weeks?

--Chris

Posted by windywinter, 02-03-2011, 12:27 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ObjectZone
Weeks huh? Is that why no packet loss today? 1 day = n weeks?

--Chris
I mean the hole Egyptian area network, not only a small datacenter.

Posted by ObjectZone, 02-03-2011, 12:36 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by windywinter
I mean the hole Egyptian area network, not only a small datacenter.
The reason the entire country of Egypt was possible to shut off was due to the highly centralized nature of international links, which was no doubt by design of the central parliament. This fact should mean that turning it back on is just as easy as it was to shut off -- like a light switch.

--Chris

Posted by windywinter, 02-03-2011, 12:38 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ObjectZone
The reason the entire country of Egypt was possible to shut off was due to the highly centralized nature of international links, which was no doubt by design of the central parliament. This fact should mean that turning it back on is just as easy as it was to shut off -- like a light switch.

--Chris
IP based network doesn't work like light switch.

Posted by freethought, 02-03-2011, 12:51 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ObjectZone
The reason the entire country of Egypt was possible to shut off was due to the highly centralized nature of international links, which was no doubt by design of the central parliament. This fact should mean that turning it back on is just as easy as it was to shut off -- like a light switch.

--Chris
Actually the Renesys analysis of the BGP withdrawal messages that they observed showed that the shutoff didn't happen instantly.

My own observations of the BGP announcements as Egypt returned to the internet showed different networks returning over about a 20 minute period (see one of my previous posts in this thread).

Also remember that the Noor Group disconnection happened a couple of days after everyone else and came back an hour or so after other Egyptian ISPs.

Vodafone even confirmed that they were ordered by the Egyptian government to shut down their services and made no mentioned of this being done forcefully from a central point.

The international links from many of the Middle Eastern and some Asian countries pass through Egypt on the same submarine fibre systems that link Egypt on to Europe and these links weren't affected.

Posted by ObjectZone, 02-07-2011, 11:05 PM
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/01/...own/index.html

--Chris

Posted by NetDepot - Terrence, 02-11-2011, 12:33 PM
They did it, Mubarak resigns, hands power to the army..



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