Egypt's largest ISPs shut off their networks Thursday, making it impossible for traffic to get to websites hosted in Egypt or for Egyptians to use e-mail, Twitter or Facebook. The regime of President Hosni Mubarak also ordered the shut down of mobile phone networks, including one run by the U.K.-based Vodafone, all in an attempt to undermine the growing protests over Mubarak's autocratic rule of the country.
"There has been a common thread in the recent political upheaval in Tunisia and Egypt: Social media has played a role in both influencing the protests and reporting on them.
"Social media is key to the revolution taking place in North Africa, and this may actually be the first time a government leader has lost power because of social media," said Darrell West, the vice president for governance studies at the Brookings Institution, referring to the ousting of former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali."
"As in Tunisia, the protest movement in Egypt is taking advantage of social media to communicate, inform and organize."
"First, Egypt blocked social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I had no trouble believing the Egyptian government would do that. But, when I first heard that Egypt had blocked the Internet, I was inclined to doubt the stories. Since then though I've heard from a technically savvy source, Renesys, an Internet analytics firm, that Egypt really has blocked the vast majority of its Internet connections. In short, the Egyptian government has cut its people off from the Internet."
Protests in Egypt are expected to intensify with opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei's return to Cairo, and reports of Twitter and Facebook being blocked inside the country by Egyptian authorities continue to surface through the social networks themselves, and according to HerdictWeb. Users are also reporting that SMS - short message service - is being blocked as well.
Though it does appear that both Twitter and Facebook are still being blocked, many users are bypassing the blocks through proxy servers and third-party apps. Here is how they're doing it.
"There are current disputes within the blogisariat about the role and significance of social media and other technologies in animating, enabling, and empowering the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. This discussion, which moves back and forth between techno-philes and techno-skeptics, techno-optimists and techno-pessimists is however, mainly of interest to those who are interested, that is the blogisariat and their followers."