Iraq Internet Shutdown Is Good News for One App: FireChat
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Political unrest is rarely a positive development for Internet companies. As governments in the Middle East demonstrated repeatedly during the Arab Spring, online access is one of the first things to go when there are whiffs of an uprising.
Iraq is responding as you might expect to Islamic extremists who are threatening to break the country apart. When Iraqis recently began to experience limits on Web access — first, with blocks on social media, and then, network outages — thousands flocked to FireChat, a smartphone app that lets users in close proximity communicate freely without an Internet connection.