Syria yet again suffers an internet outage, cutting its citizens off from the rest of the online world. According to Internet monitoring firm Renesys, internet in the country has been down since Wednesday, 7:01 UTC (12:01 a.m. PDT).
Confirmation
U.S. based Renesys confirmed in a tweet that BGP (border gateway patrol) is down, inbound trace routes are failing, and DNS severs and government web sites are down.
Another tweet from the state-run Syrian news agency informs that the problem is being worked upon, and internet will be restored as soon as possible.
The internet outage was also confirmed by the networking firm Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM). The content delivery company posted an image reflecting no Internet traffic since Wednesday.
Why?
The reasons for the outage are still not clear, but a tweet from Renesys hints at possible relation to a United Nations decision regarding Syria. The U.N. has been scorning the government of the country over excessive use of weaponry, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. A resolution for the political transformation of the battled country is expected to get U.N. approval on Wednesday.
Even if the resolution gets U.N. backing it may not pose a grave threat to the Syrian government, but the objective behind cutting the internet may be to stop Syrian citizens from hearing the news.
Google & Twitter Helping
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Twitter offered the help of an old service that was used in November last year, to help the isolated Syrians communicate with the world.
“We’ve reactivated Speak2Tweet,” Christine Chen, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Communication senior manager, told Al Arabiya. According to Chen, the present outage won’t affect this service as Speak2Tweet does not require internet access, but does need a phone connection.
Earlier Incidents
Including this incident, the troubled country has suffered 6 major communications blackouts during the two-year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Networking firms believe a possible government role in all cases.
Last week, also, Syria faced an internet outage, during which citizens were denied access for more than 19 hours. At that time, the government blamed faulty fiber optic cables for the outage; however, Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM)’s product line director termed it as “unlikely.”
