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Syrian internet access mostly restored, for now
History has a way of repeating itself, and the turmoil in Syria is proving no exception -- though potentially for the better. Following a communications blackout that began Thursday, reports have surfaced from Renesys, the AP, the BBC and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that internet and phone access has resumed across major swaths of the country as of Saturday. President al-Assad's office and rebels accuse each other of severing the links, although the US State Department doesn't see there being much debate: it believes the near-simultaneous cut was an attempt by Assad to disrupt opposition that has been using the internet as one of its coordinating tools. It's difficult to know if links will remain intact when battles inside the country are as fierce as ever. While there's some comfort to be had in knowing that technologies like satellite internet access are available if the lines go dark once again, we just hope that peace comes to the country instead. [Image credit: Aziz1005, Wikimedia Commons]
Syrian internet goes down, gets cut off from the world
The civil war-torn nation of Syria has seemingly disappeared from the internet. In a sign that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is trying to limit the flow of information and possibly increase its violent crackdown on opposition forces, all 84 blocks of IP addresses used by the nation have gone offline. The blackout was first reported by Renesys this morning at around 5:26am ET and the #SyriaBlackout hashtag has started picking up steam on Twitter as others have noticed. While it's unclear exactly what has happened and investigations are on going, and a nationwide outage is highly suspicious. The Associated Press is reporting that rebels are laying blame for the blackout at the feet of the government and that cellphone service has also been severed. We'll update as more information rolls in, but we wouldn't expect good news. Update: Akamai has provided more confirmation of the outage. As you can see in the image above, at some point this morning the amount of data coming out of Syria simply dropped to zero.
Syrian internet knocked out as protests fill the streets (video)
The Washington Post is reporting a massive internet outage across Syria today, a fact confirmed by government-backed outlet Syria-News.com. Internet traffic monitoring group Renesys began noting the outage at 7:00AM eastern time, with two-thirds of networks in the country affected -- half an hour later, 49 out of 50 networks in Syria were hit. The outage struck the nation as some 50,000 protesters took to the streets as part of a "Children's Friday" protest, drawing attention to the death of dozens of children in prior protests and calling for the resignation of the country's president, Bashar al-Assad. The timing has led many to speculate that the government itself is behind the shutdown, seemingly echoing recent outages in Egypt and Libya -- and Syria's long history of monitoring internet activity on sites like Facebook and YouTube certainly seems to lend credence to that claim. Video coverage of protests after the break.
