ourselves hillary clinton calling on egypt to respect what she calls universal human rights. we urge the egyptian authorities to allow peaceful protests and to reverse the unprecedented steps it has taken to cut off communications. shepard: now u.s. officials are using social media to protest egypt s communication blackout. rick leventhal our senior correspondent in our new york newsroom tonight explained how egypt was able to black out everything. well, we are hearing it was remarkably easy because egypt adopted the internet relatively late there are only a few web access points so the government can basically shut it down with just a handful of phone calls. that s apparently what happened. the four primary internet providers handling virtually all of egypt s web traffic went dark at 12:34 a.m. we have a graphic showing web usage on january 27th inside egypt. and it s a dramatic dropoff.