Since about 3pm ET today, internet activity in Syria has almost completely ceased. Google’s Twitter handle reported that all Google services are inaccessible in Syria. Mobile communications are completely offline in the border city Daraa. Look at this graph of Syria’s internet being down.
The Umbrella Security Labs wrote of the occurence on its blog, “Currently both TLD servers for Syria, ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.sy are unreachable. The remaining two nameservers sy.cctld.authdns.ripe.net. and pch.anycast.tld.sy. are reachable since they are not within Syria.”
The big-data site also notes that while internet connection between Syria and the outside world is severed at this time, it may not be inside of the country. They continue, “Although we can’t yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fiber cuts and power outages.”
The Umbreally Security Labs and Google aren’t the only ones indicating the internet loss. Renesys, BGPMon, and Akamai also accounted the outage according to the Huffington Post.
The country has performed tests like this in the past, but has also consciously killed internet connection. This incident, though, comes at a time when foreign policy in the region as extremely tense. Syria has been the subject of Israeli airstrikes recently and Israel happens to be the United States’ most trusted ally in the Middle East.
Internet censorship in Syria is also rampant. However, an internet blackout such as the one currently underway has happened before most recently last November. This coincided with rebel forces storming the capital city of Damascus resulting in complete internet outage and silenced mobile communications. The connection was subsequently restored within two days.
Jenan Moussa, Reporter for Arabic Al Aan TV from Dubai, is reporting via her Twitter account that activists in Latakia are confirming the internet blackout. She did note, however, that most activists have forgone the highly-censored government internet in favor of a satellite meaning most are still online. She has since been able to communicate with activists in the cities of Idelb, Apello, and Hama, as well as Latakia.
Moussa also tweeted that this kind of thing happens all the time, and that many of the activists are unphased because of the recurrence, according to her activist sources. But as was the case back in November, Damascus is utterly unreachable via internet or mobile. Fellow activists are currently unable to reach the capital city at this time as well.
Activist Shakeeb Al-Jabri chimed in that “This is not a localized internet blackout, this is Syria withdrawing itself from the internet map.”
I reached out to both Shakeeb Al-Jabri and Jenan Moussa on Twitter to see if they could fathom an explanation for the blackout. Here is the interaction,
@nickdeluca1 @jenanmoussa Assad wants to wipe out Damascus in silence
— Shakeeb Al-Jabri (@LeShaque) May 7, 2013
Stay tuned to BostInno for the latest developments regarding the sudden and unexpected internet outage in Syria.
