Life in the Cairo and Giza governorates, home to 20 million Egyptians, was thrown into disarray this week after a fire broke out at the Ramses Central Exchange, one of Egypt’s largest telecommunications and digital infrastructure hubs, sending shockwaves through nearly every aspect of daily activity.
What began as a seemingly minor incident on Monday afternoon quickly escalated into a national crisis, disrupting communication networks across large parts of the country and paralysing key sectors.
The scene began unfolding around 4pm, when thick grey smoke billowed from the roof of the 98-year-old building in the heart of Downtown Cairo, according to eyewitnesses. Within minutes, the smoke engulfed much of the area, halting movement as fire trucks, civil defence teams, and police vehicles converged on the site.
Curious onlookers, both pedestrians and car drivers, crowded the scene, drawn to the rare spectacle unfolding in a neighbourhood already famous for its congestion and noise and ceaseless flow of people.
The Ministry of Health indicated on Tuesday afternoon that 27 people had been injured, some treated at the scene and others transferred to nearby hospitals, while four bodies were recovered from the site.
The fire, according to an employee at a state-run newspaper overlooking the site, began on the top floor of the main 11-storey building and soon spread to the adjoining six-storey building that is designated for international telecommunications, also starting on its top floor.
However, other eyewitnesses who watched the scene from the other side of the blaze stated that the blaze had broken out on the seventh floor of the main building.
Despite intermittent control by firefighting teams, the flames continued to spread during nearly seven hours, flaring up again in different parts of the two buildings, even after being extinguished, the owner of a spare parts shop on the other side of the building told Al-Ahram Weekly.
As the fire spread, several employees remained trapped inside.
At around 9pm, five hours after what had initially seemed a minor blaze, an onlooker below the building shouted to firefighters and civil defence personnel, pointing to an upper-floor window where someone was seen waving a phone flashlight, signalling desperately for help.
According to another witness, similar scenes had unfolded throughout the evening on different floors, with several people eventually rescued using fire brigade ladders.
Though the severity differed, the suffering was not limited to those trapped inside the building. The fire’s impact extended to landline and mobile networks, cutting off much of the fixed Internet service across Greater Cairo.
It disrupted electronic payment systems and money transfers, affected hotline services, including the main emergency medical line, and interfered with railway booking systems, ATM operations, and air traffic at Cairo International Airport.
The outage also led to the suspension of trading on the Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
“One of the hardest parts,” said a Cairo resident, “was that I spent most of Monday in complete darkness at home. I couldn’t recharge my prepaid electricity meter card because the mobile payment apps weren’t working and there was no Internet, something we now rely on for almost every part of daily life.”
The mother of a student doing her Thanaweya Amma exams, expressed concern over the Internet outage’s impact on her daughter’s revision. “She relies heavily on YouTube videos for last-minute reviews and studying. The outage caused her a great deal of stress and confusion. I hope officials take the human side into account when grading,” the mother said.
All affected services will be identified once firefighting operations are complete in order to compensate those impacted, according to Telecom Egypt, the state-owned operator of the Ramses Central building.
The Ministry of Health announced alternative emergency contact numbers following the disruption to hotline services caused by the fire. In a Monday evening statement, the ministry advised that in case of difficulty reaching the ambulance hotline (123), citizens can call the emergency police line (122) to request ambulance services.
DISRUPTION
The Ministry of Civil Aviation announced on Monday that the Cairo International Airport had experienced operational disruptions between 6pm on Monday and 1am on Tuesday. Of 69 scheduled flights, the ministry said, 36 had departed as planned, while 33 were undergoing procedures at the time of releasing the statement.
In a separate statement later on Tuesday, the Ministry confirmed that all affected flights had since taken off following the unexpected telecommunications and Internet outage.
The Egyptian National Railways apologised on Monday for a nationwide disruption in its ticket booking system, attributing it to emergency Internet outages beyond its control.
On Tuesday morning, Minister of Communication and Information Technology Amr Talaat stated that all telecommunication services would be gradually resumed within 24 hours.
“While full restoration may take several days, vital services have already been reactivated through alternative procedures,” the minister said. He added that efforts are underway to assess the damage and determine the cause of the fire in coordination with the relevant authorities.
In a press statement, Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) said on Monday evening that the fire had affected the speed and quality of telecommunication services in several areas, resulting in a temporary disruption.
The NTRA added that all fixed Internet traffic had been rerouted through the alternative exchange centre at the Rawda Central. It also noted that fixed Internet and mobile services (voice and data) were affected across the three mobile operators due to damage to several interconnection circuits.
Technical teams from Telecom Egypt and the mobile operators are currently coordinating efforts to restore and reroute the affected circuits through other exchanges in the network, the NTRA said.
The Public Prosecution announced on Tuesday afternoon that it has launched an investigation to determine the cause of the fire and assess compliance with occupational safety and health measures, as well as civil defence and fire safety regulations.
It added that prosecutors will inspect the site internally once firefighting and cooling operations are completed.
Telecoms and digital transformation expert Loai Zoheir described the incident as tragic, particularly given the loss of life among Telecom Egypt employees, but stressed that the company has contingency systems in place.
“Telecom Egypt operates independent backup systems capable of stepping in during such crises from different locations outside Ramses Central,” Zoheir told the Weekly.
“The rapid return of services after the fire is evidence of this. Without robust contingency planning and high operational readiness, the outage would have lasted much longer.”
He added that the full picture will only become clear once official statements are released detailing the timeline of the incident, the deployment of backup systems, and how the crisis was managed.
Shehata Al-Sayed, an AI engineer and the founder of a company specialising in technology and AI, described the Ramses Central fire as far more than a typical technical failure.
“What happened at Ramses Central wasn’t just an electrical short or a bit of smoke,” Al-Sayed said. “This isn’t a regular exchange. It’s the heart of Egypt’s network,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
He explained that the Ramses Central functions as one of the country’s core nodes, a vital hub through which vast volumes of traffic pass, including phone calls, Internet data, banking transactions, and emergency signals.
The building is integrated into the national fibre-optic system, linking not only to international cables from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean but also to nearly every local exchange across Cairo and Giza.
Al-Sayed said that because of these links, any disruption at Ramses is immediately felt across the wider network. He noted that the exchange handles more than just fixed-line services, as it also plays a key role in routing mobile calls, managing international Internet access, and supporting sensitive digital services like InstaPay and mobile banking systems.
He said that as the fire spread, smoke had infiltrated highly sensitive fibre-optic equipment, stating “the smoke is more dangerous than fire.”
“It contains particles that block laser signals inside the fibre cables. Once that path is obstructed, the system suffers a complete signal loss, and the devices often shut themselves down to protect their internal components.”
The development led to what Al-Sayed described as a critical point of failure: core switches lost their routing tables, and when power was restored, the devices required significant time to reboot and reconfigure.
“We’re not talking about simple devices here,” he noted. “Core systems don’t just forward traffic. They also manage protocols that handle call routing, especially for emergency services. That’s why the hotlines failed.”
The financial impact, Al-Sayed warned, was equally serious. Banks depend on secure and time-sensitive systems to authenticate transactions, and even a brief network interruption can cause major disruptions.
“That’s what brought services like the InstaPay application to a halt and froze many ATMs,” he said, referring to the Central Bank of Egypt’s (CBE) application that enables individuals to conduct instant financial transactions across Egyptian banks and financial institutions.
“In Egypt, a large portion of banking traffic still flows through Ramses. When that hub fails, the entire financial network feels it,” Al-Sayed said.
DIGITISATION
Ahmed Yehia, the owner of a small business, confirmed to the Weekly that most of his company’s operations had come to a halt on Tuesday due to their reliance on banking transactions.
“I tried in vain to check our bank statements and transactions,” Yehia said. “When I called the customer service of the bank, they told me the system was down. We managed to get some paperwork done to keep things moving, but the core of our operations was effectively on pause.”
Egypt has made steady and determined strides in digital transformation over the past decade, with notable progress in digitalising public services and IT infrastructure.
Government entities have invested in developing user-friendly digital platforms aimed at improving accessibility and service efficiency for citizens.
These efforts span a wide range of initiatives from e-government portals to mobile applications that streamline everyday transactions.
This progress is reflected in Egypt’s performance on the United Nations E-Government Development Index (EGDI), a key global benchmark of a country’s ability to deliver online public services.
Egypt ranked 95th out of 193 countries in 2024, marking an upward trend from 103rd in 2022 and 111th in 2020, a clear indication of the country’s ongoing commitment to digital modernisation, said the Egyptian cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Centre.
However, as recent incidents show, the resilience of this digital backbone remains a critical area for development, according to experts.
Mohamed Kholaif, a digital transformation consultant and member of the Telecommunications and Information Technology Research Council at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, told the Weekly that the Ramses Central fire is a stark indicator of deep structural challenges within Egypt’s national telecom infrastructure.
“This incident should be viewed not as a mere technical malfunction, but as a critical reminder of our reliance on a single point,” he said. “The Ramses Central represents exactly that — a centralised node under enormous pressure — which makes the entire system vulnerable to a total shutdown in the event of disruption.”
Kholaif called for a strategic reassessment of Egypt’s digital readiness, urging policymakers to treat the incident as an opportunity for comprehensive infrastructure reform. He stressed the need to move away from legacy systems towards more resilient network architectures that distribute loads across multiple active paths, minimising disruption risk.
“What we need is not a patch for the symptoms, but a re-engineering of the infrastructure itself, an investment in more flexible systems that ensure service continuity during emergencies,” he explained.
This, he noted, includes upgrading power, ventilation, and early warning systems, and linking central facilities to telecom and energy networks that can respond automatically to prevent system-wide collapse.
He also emphasised the importance of crisis planning and technical staff training through regular simulation-based emergency protocols.
“What happened doesn’t negate Egypt’s digital transformation efforts,” he concluded, “but it does highlight that digitisation is incomplete without a robust backbone capable of withstanding such shocks.”
As of March 2025, Egypt had 89.6 million active mobile Internet users, including both voice-and-data and data-only subscriptions, according to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology’s monthly report.
The same report recorded 13.3 million fixed telephone lines nationwide and 11.8 million active fixed broadband (ADSL) subscriptions, with 35 per cent of the latter concentrated in Greater Cairo.
*Additional reporting by Ahmed Abdel-Hafez
**(This article first appeared in print in Al Ahram Weekly on July 10, 2025.)
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