Egypt’s Internet is down, according to reports

Egypt has gone offline.

In a stunning development unprecedented in the modern history of the Internet, a country of more than 80 million people has found itself almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the world.

The near-disconnection—at least one Internet provider is still online—comes after days of street protests demanding an end to nearly three decades of autocratic rule by President Hosni Mubarak. Those followed this month’s revolution in Tunisia, another country with little political freedom and high levels of corruption.

Jim Cowie, chief technology officer at Internet-monitoring firm Renesys, said that at approximately 2:34 p.m. PT, his company “observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table.” (See CNET’s earlier coverage of network disruptions.)

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