Egypt disconnects the Internet

Here's an early look at how the Mubarak government managed to sever the country from the Internet.

To judge the Eygptian government's success at cutting off its rioting citizens from the global Internet, just glance at this graph of the traffic that Akamai (AKAM) sends into the country:

Another Internet observer,  a company called Renesys that specializes in monitoring the Internet, witnessed a similar thing.  That company says that as of today 93% of Egyptian networks are unreachable from the outside world.  Even that may overstate the accessibility of Egypt, since most of the networks that remain online are likely the smaller ones.

One thing that enabled this to happen is the limited number of network providers that carry Internet traffic into and out of Egypt, according to David Belson, Director of Competitive Intelligence at Akamai, which is in the business of delivering Internet content around the globe.