How Egypt Turned Off the web [Egypt]

Yesterday, something unprecedented happened: Egypt turned off the web. A nation of 80,000,000, instantly disconnected. So how’d they do it?

Kill Switch

There was no giant lever or big red button involved, but on the contrary it was almost as easy: the Egyptian Government simply issued an order for ISPs to shut down service.

” Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the perfect to issue such an order and we are obliged to follow it,” Vodafone Egypt explained in a press release shortly after. In addition to Vodafone, Egypt’s other three major ISPs, Link Egypt, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr, all stopped service.

BGPs

The internet monitoring firm Renesys saw the results immediately . Some 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol or BGP routes-the places where networks connect and announce which IP addresses they’re liable for-disappeared directly:

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the almost simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks within the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths through which the remainder of the area could continue to replace Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

But Stéphane Bortzmeyer, an IP communications whiz , surmised that Egypt pulled the plug on the internet literally: ” BGP is the symptom, not the cause. The cables have simply been unplugged.”

Withdrawing BGP routes (or just unplugging cables) is a far simpler way of blocking the web than, say, turning off DNS, wherein case users could use DNS from overseas to access the net. Compared to Tunisia, where certain BGP routes were blocked or Iran, where internet connections were simply throttled, Egypt’s disconnection is a severe one.

Disconnected
As of last night, Renesys estimated that 93% of Egyptian’s networks were unreachable, with just one corporation, the Noor Group, still serving its customers. It’s unclear why they’re the single ones who didn’t get turned off.

Still, reports from Egypt are suggesting that citizens could possibly use dial-up to access the net , and LifeHacker has the nitty gritty on ways to do it . It’s unlikely to be fast, however looks like for a limiteless majority of the Egyptians, it would be the best choice. [ Renesys , DomainIncite ]

Source

This post is tagged: border gateway protocol, egyptian government, internet addresses, internet monitoring, ip communications