Algeria Internet and Facebook Not Shut Down !
Feb 13, 2011
When the Egyptian government decided to flip the switch on its country's Internet on Jan. 27, news of the unprecedented shut down spread rapidly. Rumors that the same thing has happened today in Algeria are unfounded, even though the country has been on the radar for a possible "domino effect" of events in Tunisia and Egypt. Internet intelligence authority Renesys, which confirmed the Egypt outage weeks ago, says in a new blog post that it has no evidence that Algeria's Internet has been shut down. Algeria typically has about 135 routed network prefixes in the global routing table, and our data show that they are all still routed and relatively stable. Traceroutes inbound confirm that sites hosted in these prefixes are still alive, and spot checks of websites hosted in Algeria show that most are up and functioning normally. It's possible, that there are some Internet blocks not visible to outside the country, similar to Iranian-style throttling, but that ca...