Internet shutdowns in Egypt and Libya are reflected in BitTorrent connections (or lack thereof).
Prompted by news of the governments of Egypt and Libya shutting down Internet access, we examine these events as seen from BitTorrent and captured by users of some of our software extensions - including Ono, NEWS, and Dasu.
Both graphs below show the number of BitTorrent peers seen for each country, per hour, before and after Internet access was cut off. In each case, we can clearly see a sharp drop in the number of connected users in those countries, to the point that each country almost completely disappears from BitTorrent. These drops coincide with the times reported by other sources that each country cut off its Internet connection (which are depicted by the shaded regions).
Time (UTC)
# of Peers
Number of peers seen in Egypt (per hour) from January 25th to the 31st. The shaded region begins when Egypt first went offline according to BGPmon.net (January 27th at 22:28 UTC).
