Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP

We’re hearing reports on Twitter that the coverage of Noor Group’s DSL service, Egypt’s last standing ISP which powers the Egyptian Stock Exchange as well as sites of major brands like Coca Cola and Exxon Mobile, is being shut down, meaning the nation will lose nearly all the remaining high-speed links to the outside world.

According to Jacob Applebaum the shut down is occurring in stages and certain sites are still online, “noor.net shut all except NTG, the National Technology Group providing IT processing to the aviation, banking and financial sectors.” The ISP’s website itself is offline.

http://twitter.com/#!/ioerror/status/32188095344410624

Effective Measure CEO Scott Julian confirms that the traffic from Noor has trickled to a halt and the last two ISPs are offline, “Effective Measure was recording active traffic from Noor coming in the hour of 11pm last night up until midnight Egypt time but from 12am onwards, we have no active sessions from Noor IP addresses and no data has appeared in the logs.”

Julian also points out these connectivity blackouts happened around same time as the last batch and posits that this is a well organized effort. Dial-up is presumably still working as Google and Twitter have just launched a speak-to-tweet service at http://twitter.com/speak2tweet.

Update: Internet Monitoring service Rensys is confirming the Noor shut down.

Applebaum has tweeted out this graph of the current set of IPv6 addresses online in Egypt. Noor is not one of them.