As I sit here, from my nice safe desk in an anonymous building somewhere in Essex, I can see the internet. Not just Twitter, not Facebook, not any of a million other websites but the “routes” that tell service providers how to reach each other.

There’s a hole in those routes right now, where Egypt used to be. I can see one small bit, Noor Group, is still online but that’s it.

This isn’t good and neither is the violence but it’s not what I wanted to write about. I want to write about Vodafone.

There’s been criticism levelled at Vodafone for bowing to Egyptian government pressure in turning off the mobile phone network. I don’t believe they had any choice, not because of government political pressure but because otherwise they’d be asking their engineers to put their lives on the line.

Almost all networks are terribly, terribly vulnerable to anyone with enough internal knowledge. If you know physically where certain bits of equipment are (HLRs, if you’re into mobile phones) you can shut them down and bring the whole network down. There’s probably only a few locations – maybe only two, perhaps as many as a dozen or so – where these devices are held.

It only takes one engineer to tell the authorities where those locations are.

What then? Are you asking engineers to barricade themselves inside data centres until either the generators run out of fuel or the authorities break in? People have been beaten and shot there, so you’re asking the engineers to potentially martyr themselves just to buy a few days or even hours of mobile network coverage.

And if the engineers and managers and everyone else all refuse to say?

I have kids. Someone holds a gun to their head and I’m going to sing like a canary and I would tell them where those locations are and shut them down myself if necessary.

Sorry, but that’s the way it is. I expect no more of my colleagues in Egypt than I expect of myself.

I’m an engineer, not a martyr.