Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers.
All of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable worldwide. This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia where specific routes were blocke or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.
What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet. What will happen tomorrow on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up. We will continue to dig into the event, and will update this story as we learn more. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.
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.