EGYPT, 28 Jan - The Egyptian government denied taking any action on restriction of web, saying it respected freedom of expression.
However, Twitter said it is being blocked but said many people have found ways round the restrictions. A Swedish mobile video site also reported that it had been blocked.
Herdict, a project run by Harvard University to collect data about websites that are down, has had many reports about twitter being occasionally unresponsive during the protests. Reports also suggested that Facebook, that has been used as one of the mediums to co-ordinate many of the protests, has been occasionally blocked. Bambuser, a service that used to stream live video from a phone to a website or a Facebook page, had also been blocked by the Egyptian government.
"Blocking is not official policy in Egypt, so block pages are not given to users when a site is blocked," said Ms York.
This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.
What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up.
