On January 18th, 115,000 websites participated in a widespread blacking out their website (including our own website) to protest the censorship that was allowed into the House bill SOPA--as well as the Senate bill PIPA.

Since then, Congress received 400,000-500,000 phone calls about it. Some congressmen had their websites go down due to the amount of traffic.

The world's most popular websites including Google, Ebay, Craigslist, Reddit, Imgur, and Wikipedia, blocked out their sites. Additionally, well known influential top 100 sites like Wired, Drudge Report, Techdirt, Flickr, Mozilla, Wordpress also wrote messages or completely blocked their own site in protest.

14 senators issued statements against PIPA/SOPA, the day after. It sort of twisted congress's position from mostly supporting to mostly opposing.

Of course, now there is fear of ACTA having some civil rights violations and internet censorship as well, but this isn't a bill, it's a treaty so it could already have a much better chance if people don't protest more actively.

Here's an infographic of the day the internet stood still:



Source: FrugalDad