Internet Shutdown in Syria

Aleteia - published on 05/08/13

Experts suspect Syrian gov’t is behind outage

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The whole country of Syria lost connection to the Internet Tuesday afternoon. The Syrian government claims that the country-wide Internet outage is due to a hardware malfunction, but experts say that this is probably untrue since Syria has multiple connections to the Internet, and all of them failing at the same time is highly unlikely. Experts suspect the government intentionally caused the outage to hamper efforts by rebels. The BBC has more on the story:

A "fault in optical fibre cables" is to blame for Syria's continued internet blackout, local state-run media said.

The Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the fault would be fixed "as soon as possible".

However, one key expert told the BBC this explanation was "unlikely".

Web monitoring firms said regular traffic on the internet plummeted to zero just before 19:00 GMT on Tuesday (22:00 local time).

"Our monitoring shows that Syria's international internet connectivity is through at least four providers, and published submarine cable maps show connectivity through three active cables," said Akamai's David Belson.

"As such, the failure of a single optical cable is unlikely to cause a complete internet outage for the country."

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