Egypt went offline on January 27, 2011. The Mubarak government, watching the Tunisian revolution's model spread toward Cairo, took an unprecedented step: ordering the country's internet service providers to shut down connectivity entirely. For approximately five days, Egypt — a country of 80 million people — was essentially severed from the global internet.

The blackout was not, ultimately, effective as a protest-suppression strategy. Activists had anticipated the possibility and prepared for it; some had physical documentation of protest routes and meeting points. More fundamentally, Tahrir Square was already full of people who knew where they were going without needing Twitter to tell them.

The physical images that escaped Egypt during those days — through satellite phones, through journalists and tourists who happened to be present, through the small number of connections that evaded the shutdown — showed something that the Mubarak government had not anticipated: that Egyptians were willing to stand in the square and face tear gas, rubber bullets, and the batons of plainclothes security forces in numbers large enough that clearing them became impossible without a level of violence that the regime had not yet steeled itself to deploy.

The burning referred to the fires set at police stations across multiple Egyptian cities — outposts of a security apparatus that had spent thirty years serving primarily as an instrument of political repression and that ordinary Egyptians had accumulated enormous grievances against.

What happened next — Mubarak's resignation on February 11, the military's assumption of power, the subsequent complications — would take years to resolve. But for those days in late January and early February, Tahrir Square became one of the most watched places on earth.