Attempts to block Wire and Facebook Messenger

The 20 September protests were followed by another call for protest on 27 September. And despite that this last call did not receive attention, yet the Egyptian government spent the whole week trying to block instant chatting applications and news websites. On 22 September, the government attempted to ban Wire instant chatting application on Vodafone. On the next day, the government attempted to block Facebook Messenger on mobile telephone networks. Messages were received by users saying, “Facebook Messenger is currently unavailable”. The Facebook Messenger website was also blocked for a limited period. Fourteen other instant chatting websites were also blocked during this period. On 24 September, the government tried to ban Twitter. On the same day technologists noticed there was a geographical blocking on Twitter and Facebook in downtown Cairo.