Vodafone restores services to Egypt after mobile shutdown

Mobile operator, Vodafone, has restored mobile phone services in Egypt after a 24-hour shutdown.

According to Reuters , mobile phone operators were instructed to suspend services on Friday last week during unprecedented demonstrations calling for Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to step down.

Vodafone said it had restored voice services on Saturday morning after its only option was to comply with the demands of Egyptian authorities to temporarily shutdown its services.

“We would like to make it clear that the authorities in Egypt have the technical capability to close our network, and if they had done so it would have taken much longer to restore services to our customers,” said Vodafone.

The Egyptian internet experienced a near blackout last week following an eruption of protests across the country. According to internet monitoring firm BGPmon, 88% of the country’s internet was offline.

The latest BBC report said at least 100 people have died since rallies began last Tuesday.

Chinese authorities are reported to have blocked news coverage about the protests in Egypt amid concern about political reform action in China. Online discussions about Egypt on micro-blogging site, Sina, were restricted.