Egypt restores Internet, report

Egypt restored the Internet on Wednesday, according to reports, after one week of a blackout for Internet and cellphone users apparently aimed to stem civil unrest.

As of about 4:30 a.m. Eastern time (11:30 a.m. in Cairo), all major Egyptian Internet service providers appeared to have relighted routes to their domestic customer networks in a global routing table, network expert Reneysis Group said in a blog.

And Web sites such as the Egyptian State Information Service have been restored. The Wall Street Journal reports cellphone service MobiNil is back up and running.

But numerous accounts on Twitter show that social networking site and others might be blocked in Egypt. When the government began to target communications services, they first targeted Twitter and Facebook on Jan. 25. Two days later, the Egyptian government, with an Internet adoption rate of about 30 percent, entirely shut down Internet access. Cellphone services were shut down intermittently throughout the past week.

WP