Internet access in Egypt was restored Wednesday as protests turned violent in the capital, a day after president Hosni Mubarak said he would not step down immediately and as pro-government demonstrators, some on horseback and camels, took to the streets and challenged opponents to the regime.

Renesys, the Internet monitoring service which first reported that Egypt’s Internet had effectively been cut last Friday, reported that it had largely been restored at 11:34am local time—5:34am EST.

Egyptian Internet providers returned to the Internet at 09:29:31 UTC (11:29am Cairo time). Websites such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt, MCDR, and the US Embassy in Cairo, are once again reachable. All major Egyptian ISPs appear to have readvertised routes to their domestic customer networks in the global routing table The rebooted Egyptian table is smaller than it was a week ago, but that’s mostly because of a normal process called “reaggregation” (the deletion of very small, specific customer routes that are partially or totally redundant with existing announcements, generally for purposes of traffic engineering). That’s to be expected: the Egyptian table had gotten pretty dense with redundancy in the week leading up to the takedown, and it’s been cleaned up in the process of being brought back. It wasn’t totally smooth; a few larger network blocks belonging to the Egyptian Universities Network (AS2561) were still missing. Unfortunately, these included the address space that hosts the .eg top level domain servers. The routes have since recovered.

Egypt’s Internet was cut last Friday just as street protests were poised to ramp up in a “Day of Rage.” Despite the aggressive tone, protests through the weekend, while heavy on property damage—especially to government and ruling-party installations—and which did include looting, were not marked by significant clashes with the military. Dozens, however, were killed.

Egypt’s reason for cutting off the Internet, and to tamp down mobile networks, seemed obvious: to complicate the ability of the protesters to organize. Clearly, that was not effective. The government’s reason for restoring the Internet is not as clear, even as Mubarak takes a more defiant tone and as the uprising, and the government’s response to it, is playing out on live TV.