Egypt says lay off music, movie downloads after 'Net outage

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: January 31, 2008 - 10:49AM CT
ARS Technica

Egypt's Internet situation is in dire straits after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean were accidentally severed yesterday, cutting off much of the country's access to the outside world. 70 percent of the nation's Internet has been disconnected, according to Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, with phone calls to Europe and the US also being disrupted. As a result, the ministry has launched an emergency task force to deal with the situation and has asked the general public to avoid downloading more bandwidth-intensive items for now in order to allow businesses priority.   [Comments...]