Earlier this month, Syria’s internetwork was cut off from the world for close to 19 hours. This interruption was blamed on optic cable malfunction. Renesys, a company that monitors Internet activity through 1.5 million points, reported a decrease in traffic on May 15th. The outage begun at exactly 10 a.m. in Syria. It lasted for 8 hours after which Internet activity was resumed.
Syrian Internet offline again 07:01 UTC / 10:00am local.BGP down, inbound traceroutes failing, nameservers and gov websites down.
— Renesys Corporation (@renesys) May 15, 2013
Internet restored in #Syria at 15:26 UTC (18:26 Damascus time).Duration 8h25m.[Corrected outage duration.] twitter.com/renesys/status…
— Renesys Corporation (@renesys) May 15, 2013
According to Robert Kisteleki, head of research and development at the RIPE NCC, “Our RIPEstat graph for the Syria region is showing an Internet outage as of approx. 07:10 UTC. This could have been caused by a technical fault such as a cable cut or power outage, or as a result of an administrative action. In practice, this means that there is no traffic flow between Syria and the rest of the world, so in this situation it is most likely that no Syrian users can access the Internet.”
The outage was also noted by Akamai who confirmed the absence of Internet activity from Syria. http://twitter.com/akamai_soti/status/334644973871964160/photo/1
Such incidents have been reported in the past with the Syrian government having allegedly ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure including fiber cuts and power outages. The country has less than three ISPs making it vulnerable to Internet outages.
