The Egyptian government has been able to cut off most of the country’s internet access simply by shutting down the various DNS servers used by Egyptian internet service providers. As such, any requests for web pages initiated from inside Egypt have been unsuccessful since there aren’t any available DNS servers to facilitate the hand-offs, and any requests for websites located inside Egypt coming from computers anywhere else in the world haven’t worked either.
While this has affected most of Egypt’s internet traffic, some people are able to work around the issue by manually using DNS servers that haven’t been taken offline – similar to the method I used when Comcast’s DNS server went down. BGPmon.com is reporting that 88% of Egypt’s internet traffic has been knocked offline, which seems to indicate that 12% of those who are still able to access the internet there are either using alternative DNS servers or haven’t had their DNS servers taken offline yet (apparently some dial-up internet connections are still able to get through, for instance).
This is why Barry wants an IKS.
Because he’s a tyrant.