Last week the Egyptian government ordered all ISPs to switch off. Services providers were told to shut down all international connections to the Web, but one ISP, Noor, remained online. At the time, there was speculation as to why this might be and one seemingly plausible conclusion was that Egypt wanted to keep the stock exchange, which was hosted at a Noor address, online.
Whatever the reason, it seems Noor has been told to go offline too. Reports say Noor ‘went dark’ at around noon local time and Renesys says the ISP is no longer available from outside Egypt. TechCrunch cites Twitter users who say the shut down is happening in stages but there has yet to be any comment from Noor itself.
Though Noor was the last ISP left standing in Egypt, some hope arrived this morning in the form of a new Google service that allows people to phone in tweets. Google worked with a team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow, a company it acquired last week, to allow people from inside Egypt to leave their tweets by voicemail on one of three international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855). You can follow the stream of information coming out of Egypt by visiting twitter.com/speak2tweet or calling the numbers above.
