The scale of Egypt's crackdown on the Internet and mobile phones amid deadly protests against the rule of PresidentHosni Mubarak is unprecedented in the history of the web, experts said.
US President Barack Obama, social networking sites and rights groups around the world all condemned the moves by Egyptian authorities to stop activists using cellphones and cyber technology to organise rallies.
"It's a first in the history of the Internet," Rik Ferguson, an expert for Trend Micro, the world's third biggest computer security firm, told AFP.
Julien Coulon, co-founder of Cedexis, a French Internet performance monitoring and traffic management system, added: "In 24 hours we have lost 97 percent of Egyptian Internet traffic.
According to Renesys, a US Internet monitoring company, Egypt'sfour main Internet service providers cut off international access to their customers in a near simultaneous move at 2234 GMT on Thursday.
Around 23 million Egyptians have either regular or occasional access to the Internet, according to official figures, more than a quarter of the population.
"In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet," James Cowie of Renesys said in a blog post.
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