Cairo (AsiaNews / Agencies) - On the day that promises the march of the million on the streets of the capital internet has been totally blocked in Egypt, along with public transport, in an attempt to prevent those involved in the protest from communicating between each other. Even the provider Noor Group, the only to remain active in these days, has been disconnected, throwing the country into complete isolation. On January 27 Link Egypt, Vodafone / Raya, Telecom / Etisalat Misr and Egypt - the main companies – were shutdown.
Google, in response to the blocking of the Internet in Egypt, has created a way to send messages to the Twitter microblogging service, by making phone calls. Voice messages left at +16504194196, +97316199855 or +390662207294 will be instantly converted into 'tweets', messages, and posted on the Twitter platform with a 'hashtag' #egypt identification. To listen to the messages, people can call the same numbers or connect to twitter.com/speak2tweet.
The creators of the initiative Abdel-Karim Mardini, product manager at Google, and Ujjwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow, said: "We hope this can help the people in Egypt in some way to keep in touch, in such a difficult time" .
The Renesys analysis centre based in New Hampshire reports that the Noor Group shut down began at 20.46 GMT yesterday.