Mubarak and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

The events in late January and early February of 2011 in Egypt were intense to say the least. The people of Egypt started an uprising on January 25, 2011 which featured various demonstrations, labor strikes and violent disputes between protestors and supporters of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. After 18 days of protests, Mubarak eventually stepped down.

At Chartbeat, we too found excitement in the revolution. Several news sites were receiving tremendous amounts of traffic from the events (and ultimately pushed chartbeat’s total amount of concurrents over 3 million), but none more than Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was using Chartbeat’s valuable tools to react to the flood of new traffic in real time, which in itself is a quite interesting story. After the events in Egypt were over, and Mubarak had finally stepped down, I decided to visualize (using HTML5, CSS 3, and Javascript) Al Jazeera’s traffic with key events over the past 18 days to see how specific events affected their traffic. The results follow:


Chartbeat's 2011 Egyptian Revolution Infographic

Click here to see the full, HTML5 version.

The data is certainly interesting to look at in this format and it’s quite amazing to see exactly how popular Al Jazeera became during this historical event.

Information about the infographic for the geeks

  • Quicksand Font using @font-face
  • CSS 3 Animations
  • Pure CSS bar charts (with the help of jQuery)
  • HTML5 (although, nothing fancy from the HTML5 spec is used)