Recent events in Egypt

As many of you may know, Egypt went through what can only be described as an Internet Blackout.

The president ordered that all external access through the internet, cell phones calls, and sms messages be cut off. It was certainly interesting watching the bgp announcements with the dropped routes from the announced prefixes.

With internet connectivity being restored after 5 days, and text messaging also being re-enabled (despite some protests about the govt using it to send incorrectly attributed messages to subscribers…) we have to ask ourselves the question “In a modern civilization where so much relies on communication, do we place too much faith in concentrated exchanges without suitable independent redundancy of transit links?”.