Egyptian Internet service providers have reestablished links to the outside world following a promise by President Hosni Mubarak not to seek reelection this fall and a call by the Egyptian military "to restore normal life."

According to Manchester, N.H.-based Renesys, an Internet traffic monitoring firm, Egyptian ISPs began restoring connections around 11:30 a.m. (Cairo time) on Feb. 2. The Egyptian government had apparently ordered ISPs to discontinue connectivity on Jan. 27 in a bid to prevent protesters from organizing. Mobile voice service was affected too, but only for about a day.

During the blackout period, Egyptians scrambled to connect to the Internet through alternate means, including dialing into international ISPs and using mobile phones as network access points. At first Egyptian ISP Noor Group was unaffected by the shutdown, but it too went dark on Monday, Renesys analysis shows.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Twitter, meanwhile, unveiled Jan. 31 a service allowing mobile phone users to leave voice mail messages on an international line that appear on a Twitter page dubbed "speak2tweet." The service, as of Feb. 1, automatically assigns a country hash tag according to where the call originated.

"We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time," Google engineers wrote in a blog post.

Chinese authorities also reacted to protesters in Egypt by blocking keyword searches of "Egypt" on two of the nation's biggest online portals and on Weibo, the homegrown microblogging service, according to many media reports.

What's next for Egypt is, of course, unknown. Pro-Mubarak protesters have apparently started to emerge and reports of violent clashes have materialized. Tahrir Square, the Cairo epicenter of anti-government protests, became the site of running battles between countervailing protesters, according to the New York Times. Mubarak supporters surged into the square "in what seemed a choreographed operation," the Times reports.

In Feb. 1 remarks, President Obama said he talked with Mubarak following the Egyptian leader's 10 minute television address during which he promised not to seek reelection. Mubarak's promise to let go of power later this year might not be enough, Obama suggested in his remarks.

"What is clear--and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak--is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now," Obama said.

Related Article:
Egyptian Internet remains mostly blocked