Egypt catches divers cutting Internet cable amid disruptions

Re:Egypt catches divers cutting Internet cable amid disruptions by ewams on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @11:05PM (#5453171)

Interesting that the Egyptian Army and Reuters are friends on Facebook. Though I suppose the Army must have a page on FB for recruitment purposes. Are they really using FB as an official information sharing portal about news like this?

Looks like a recruitment tool: https://www.facebook.com/Egyptian.Armed.Forces

Official page? http://www.mmc.gov.eg

(compare that to http://www.army.mil which looks like a news site)

Possible that because of the instability recently Eqyptian authorities think Facebook is more capable of serving web pages than their own sites? Why is an Army spokesperson talking about an event handled by the coast guard?

The ISP, Link Dot Net, does not have any English information about the event on their web page: http://www.link.net/English/Linkcorp/News+and+Events/

Apparently last week another Egyptian ISP had an issue as well: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/67894/Egypt/Pol...

Nothing on their webpage: http://www.tedata.net/eg/en/About-Us/News-And-Events

Also discovered that a lot of Egyptian websites have not had any updates to their news pages since late 2012.

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Re:Egypt catches divers cutting Internet cable amid disruptions by bdunbar on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @11:43PM (#5453255)

> Why is an Army spokesperson talking about an event handled by the coast guard?

You will have noticed that when a guy is filmed at the Pentagon handing out bad news, it's whatever PIO is up next, not an officer for that branch of the service.

Speculation: the Egyptian armed forces have the same sort of deal with the press. The Army guy was just the PIO on duty at the time.

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Re:Egypt catches divers cutting Internet cable amid disruptions by michaelt on Thursday March 28, 2013 @08:52AM (#5454467)

  Possible that because of the instability recently Eqyptian 
  authorities think Facebook is more capable of serving web 
  pages than their own sites?

Nike, McDonalds and Coca-Cola have Facebook pages they often update. Hamas and the IDF even have twitter accounts.

Perhaps it's not that they think their website is unstable - but that they think communicating with the public through Facebook and Twitter is part of the future of public relations.

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