Egypt Restores Internet Services

The Internet is back up and running in Egypt, as of Wednesday morning, according to Renesys, a Manchester, N.H.-based company that monitors Internet routing data.

On Friday, Renesys reported that the Egyptian government appeared to have taken the unprecedented step of ordering service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet.

The company said in a blog post that at 11:29 a.m. Wednesday in Cairo, 4:29 a.m. EST, websites for major organizations, such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange and U.S. Embassy in Cairo are once again reachable.

Facebook and Twitter, two social media sites that had reportedly been blocked also are up and running. "No traffic blocks are in place, DNS answers are clean, IP addresses match, no funny business. For now," Renesys said.

Some mobile phone service also has returned to normal. British Telecom provider Vodafone said on their website it was able to reinstate data services in Egypt Wednesday morning, "enabling our customers to access all internet sites." However, text messaging was still not available. "We are actively lobbying to reactivate SMS services as quickly as possible for our customers," Vodafone said.