When Egypt got their internet turned off, Google noticed

When late last week we heard that the internet in Egypt was turned off countrywide, many people began to worry.

There was no internet and no cell phone SMS text messaging for anybody in Egypt.

They essentially went dark from the web for an extended amount of time! While they still had communication via land line telephones, most people in the country and the world were in a state of disbelief.

What a childish thing to do!

More investigation by tech enthusiast Thomas Jaworowski revealed that after tracing IP addresses from the U.S. Embassy of Egypt located in Cairo, the web traffic was being blocked at the country level.

In other words, this was a government level enforced censoring.

If you look at our chart taken from the Google transparency report traffic tool, you’ll notice that the internet in Egypt was down for nearly six whole days countrywide!

Google search traffic from Egypt when their internet was blocked

From January 27th, 2011 to February 2nd, 2011, Egypt’s residents were censored by their government in a failing effort to quell and disprove protest.

That’s absolutely terrible and shocking to see! It’s too bad for the government officials in Egypt that people from all over the world noticed.

Thousands of people worldwide spoke up when they found that they couldn’t communicate with Egypt at all via the internet. Did the Egyptian government think if would be overlooked?

You can never truly silence people. Let that be a lesson to us all – or anyone filled with delusions of becoming a dictator.