Syria Plunges Into Internet Blackout

Internet access in Syria has once again been cut off, and while Syrian officials claim the outage was caused by a cut cable, network analysts are skeptical.

According to Thursday data from CloudFlare, "all traffic from Syria to the Internet stopped" between 10:26 and 10:29 UTC yesterday. The company said it received no requests from Syrian IP addresses on Thursday, which signifies "a more complete blackout than we've seen when other countries have been cut from the Internet." When Egypt went dark, for example, CloudFare still saw a few requests trickle out. In Syria, nothing.

As noted by the Jerusalem Post, Syria's minister of information blamed the outage on a "fault" in the main communications and Internet cable, which he said was perpetrated by "terrorists."

CloudFare, however, doesn't believe it. "Syria has 4 physical cables that connect it to the rest of the Internet," the company wrote in a blog post. "Three are undersea cables that land in the city of Tartous, Syria. The fourth is an over-land cable through Turkey. In order for a whole-country outage, all four of these cables would have had to been cut simultaneously. That is unlikely to have happened."

Internet monitoring firm Renesys also saw Syria drop off the Internet map yesterday. The company spotted a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the Web, but speculated that they probably don't originate in Syria.

"These are five networks that use Syrian-registered IP space, but the originator of the routes [that are still live] is actually Tata Communications," Renesys wrote in its own blog post. "These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic, and perhaps not subject to whatever killswitch was thrown today within Syria."

Overall, Internet access in Syria has been "pretty stable" until yesterday's outage, Renesys said. There was a 10-minute, country-wide outage on Nov. 25, but "by the time that one was confirmed, the outage was over." Renesys said it would be "reaching" to suggest that the government was conducting an Internet cutoff test run, "but that's a possibility," the firm concluded.

CloudFare took note of the websites that Syrians were surfing before Internet access was cut. The last four sites on CloudFare that received requests from Syria seconds before the outage were: photo-sharing blog fotoobook.com, Syrian news site aliqtisadi.com, Muslim-oriented social network madinah.com, and a porn site.

"In other words, traffic from Syrians accessing the Internet in the moments before they were cut off from the rest of the world looks remarkably similar to traffic from any part of the world," CloudFare said.

CloudFare put together a video (below) that shows the shutdown as it happened.

When Internet access in Egypt was in Jan. 2011, Google and Twitter worked together to , a tweet by phone service that let those without Internet access call a number and leave a voicemail, which would be transcribed into a tweet with the #Egypt hashtag.

In an early morning Google+ post, Google urged those in Syria to take advantage of the service. While some people have also lost access to mobile phones and landlines, those who can get to a phone can leave "a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+90 212 339 1447 or +30 21 1 198 2716 or +39 06 62207294 or +1 650 419 4196), and the service will tweet the message," Google said.

"No Internet connection is required, and people can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet," the company said.

Syria is no stranger to Internet outages and blockades of popular websites . Internet access was cut off in amidst protests, the following month.

Update: Renesys reported on Dec. 1 that Internet access had been restored. "Internet service [is] being provided post-restoration by Telecom Italia, Tata Communications, Turk Telecom, and PCCW," the firm said. Renesys said that service was restored "just as quickly and neatly as the outage: like a switch being thrown." Still, the data does not yet support claims that the government or the opposition threw the switch, Renesys said. "The only way we're going to know for sure will be to wait for a resolution to the conflict, at which point we will hear from the people who know for sure: the network engineers in Syria."