When They Pulled the Plug
The Egyptian government switched off the internet. All of it. January 2011, Cairo burning, the government decided communications were a problem and they solved it the only way that would actually work—they killed the whole network.
Banks went offline. Schools went offline. Millions of people at home staring at dead routers, nothing to connect to. It wasn’t a tactical move like other governments had tried before, cutting off Twitter or Facebook to slow coordination. Egypt looked at that half-measure and decided it wasn’t going far enough. If you want to stop people from organizing and broadcasting to the world, you turn off everything.
One provider stayed online—Noor Group. Nobody ever figured out why. Maybe an oversight, maybe someone in the bureaucracy didn’t get the order, maybe there was a deal. Hackers started threatening to attack government websites in retaliation. There was a kind of poetry to it—the global network defending itself against the country that tried to unplug from it.
But what actually got to me was how calculated it was. They knew the cost. Shutting down your own internet infrastructure destroys your economy in hours. Banks can’t function, businesses can’t operate, supply chains collapse. They did the math and decided it was worth it. Worth crippling your entire country to lock down the signal. Once you prove you can do that, once you show it’s possible, every authoritarian regime in a crisis is going to think the same thing.
I’d been online for fifteen years at that point. The internet was background radiation, something you don’t even think about. But watching it go dark made it feel thin. Provisional. Like it was only there because we hadn’t been desperate enough to turn it off. Nothing felt inevitable after that.