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This article was published on May 8, 2013

Internet in Syria has been restored after being disconnected for over 19 hours


Internet in Syria has been restored after being disconnected for over 19 hours

Internet in Syria has been restored on Wednesday at 14:13 UTC. The country went offline on Tuesday at around 18:45 UTC as Internet connectivity was completely cut across the nation.

Renesys was the first to report that Internet access was being re-established in Syria.

A few minutes later, Akamai saw a similar return:

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BGPmon confirmed as well:

One of the first ways we were tipped off about the Syrian Internet outage yesterday was via Google noting its services were inaccessible in the country. These have also now been restored:

syria_google

During the outage, Renesys has been trying to ping and traceroute hosts inside Syria, without success as nearly all of their paths withdrawn from the global routing table. The company confirmed government websites, universities, domain name servers, core infrastructure routers, banks, businesses, DSL customers, and smartphones were all unresponsive.

The reason for the outage is still unclear, but the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) has given a potential explanation. A message on the agency’s website reads “Internet services back to normal across Syria after repairing optic cable malfunction” although with a typo:

sana_cable

Internet disconnections in Syria have been commonplace in recent years, and both the government and rebels have been accused of cutting Internet and telephone connections to block communications multiple times. Past incidents occurred in June 2011, in July 2012, and in November 2012.

In all cases, the Internet was eventually restored, though outages ranged from less than an hour to over two days. The May 2013 disconnections is somewhere in the middle, at some 19.5 hours.

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