Egypt Back Online

A few moments ago I noticed the first signs of life from the previously unreachable Egyptian networks. We saw the first BGP announcements for Egypt come in at at 09:30:48 UTC. And as of 10:52 UTC the website of Noor data networks was reachable again. It looks like the majority of the providers are now back. Your prefix: 81.21.104.0/24: Prefix Description: Egypt:egypt.gov.eg eGOV Project_2 Update time: 2011-02-02 09:48 (UTC) Detected by #peers: 14 Detected prefix: 81.21.104.0/24 Announced by: AS31065 (MCIT -- Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology) Upstream AS: AS24863 (LINKdotNET-AS) One of the blocks that did not came back immediately was 193.227.1.0/24. This block hosts FRCU.EUN.eg, one of the primary name servers for the EG domain. 193.227.1.0/24 is normally announced by AS2561 Egyptian Universities Network (EUN), which before these events announced 17 networks. Currently I only see 6 of these networks, some more specifics seem to be missing. I do see 193.227.0.0/18 which is an aggregate for this netblock. Reports are that the server is reachable again from most places, however I personally can't reach it from the research network in Canada right now, from my Level3 server in Amsterdam it does work however. So I assume that the Egyptian Universities Network is only partly restored. This could result in slower DNS responses for Egyptian domain names for some users. Both Ripe and Renesys have some other nice graphs visualizing Egypt coming back online. Egypt has been offline for 5 days, this is truly unprecedented in these modern days.  It’s been interesting to see how alternative ways of electronic communications have been used and how Ad hoc Internet connections have been made available. I’ve read about amateur radio sending out morse code as well as lot’s of dial-up numbers that were distributed for Egyptians to use.