In January 2011, protests broke out across Egypt to demand an end to the despotic and repressive regime of Hosni Mubarak. The protests were largely organized online, through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Mubarak quickly realized this, and launched a counterattack: He severed all access to the internet from within Egypt.
Dyn Research, a internet performance company that analyzes how the internet performs, noted that Egypt’s Arab Spring shutdown started with just a couple phone calls from the government:
“The prior day [before the internet shutdown], we had received a tip from an Egyptian telecom engineer that the government was warning some telecoms that they should be prepared to act quickly if the government ordered the shutdown of internet services. Just after midnight local time in Egypt, that order came and nearly all Egyptian access to the global internet was down in a matter of minutes.”
Source: qz.com