Egypt is Back on the Net and Twitter Activity Surges

Following the previous post on location based tweets in Cairo during the government imposed internet black out some new Twitter data is now showing that there was a clear reduction in tweets.
The forced black out halted most internet activity during the last week of January and the first days of February. Finally on Feruary 2nd between 09h30 and 10h00 Egypt was reconnected acording to data colected by Renesys.

24 hours after the switch was turned back on the data shows an immediate raise of geolocated tweets. The activity came back up from a down of around 50 tweets per hour to 230 per hour.


Graph by single-blogs / Tweets collected using the TOM tool written by Steven Gray. The tool collects geolocated tweets originating within a 30km radius around the centre of Cairo. The graph shows number of tweets sent per hour.

This graph now shows a lo better what was going on. With the surge where tweets kick back in, the reductions is put into context and maks sense. However why there is still relatively many tweets during the black out is more difficult to explain. It is assumed that low quality channels were available but with very long delays putting more and more people of, hence the slow reduction.