The last time so much of the attention in the tech work was focused on Egypt and the middle east with respect to the lack of communications within the land of pharos was in 2008 when undersea cables were mysteriously being cut. The cause of the more recent lack of communications with Egypt is the Egyptian government's doing. 

Egypt's government has cut the masses off from the internet due to a series of protests that have been taking place around the country. That means that people in Egypt can't access things like Facebook and Twitter to keep connected with friends and loved ones. Google announced that over the weekend it devised a way to allow people in Egypt to connect to Twitter, hear tweets, and leave tweets without having internet access.

Google worked with engineers at Twitter and with its engineers from SayNow to offer a new workaround that uses voice mail to leave tweets called speak2tweet. The service can be accessed using any phone by dialing +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. To leave a tweet users just leave a voice mail and the messages will be tweeted with the #egypt hashtag.  The service is up and running now and was developed over the weekend.

The same numbers can be used to listen to tweets too. Google wrote on its official blog, "Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection." Google also said, "We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there."