Egypt Protests and Social Networking Site Access Impacted

Scanning Twitter feeds this week, I saw several posts that talked about what was going on Egypt with the caveat that they were posting for someone in Egypt.  This is because the government of Egypt allegedy blocked Facebook and Twitter after a series of anti-government protests.  Facebook was aware of disruptions in service but said it did not experience a major change in traffic.

In the CNET News article the had a quote from Jim Cowie from the internet monitoring firm, Renesys:  "at approximately 2:34pm PST, his company 'observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the internet's global routing table'.  "

@Scobleizer posted:  Egypt "Let's turn off the one thing keeping young people inside so they will stop protesting." Um, yeah, that really will work.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Egypt to unblock social networking sites, she asked them "not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including on social media".

Sources:
"US Tells Egypt to unblock Facebook, Twitter", TodayOnline, January 28, 2011.

"Twitter Reacts To Protests In Egypt", Liz McLellan, Huffington Post, January 28, 2011.

"Egypt internet outages hit Facebook and Twitter", Elinor Mills, CNET News, January 28, 2011.