Syria decides to cut off access to Internet

[nsane.forums]

If you live in Syria, well you might not be able to read this news post. As reported at ZDNet, the Middle Eastern country is suffering from some Internet connection issues. The Syria state media at first reported today that access to the Internet had been cut off by the country's government. Later the same news agency reported that the Internet was simply "broken" in parts of the country.

Much like other Middle Eastern countries, the Internet in the state of Syria is indeed owned and operated by the government specifically the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. Only 17.7 percent of all of the people in Syria have any kind of Internet access. Even with these stats, we have seen that when state-run Internet is disrupted it's usually when the government want to suppress some news. In this case, it appears that Syria is dealing with protests after a video of a 13 year old boy being murdered in late April was uncovered.

It remains to be seen if this new move by the government to shut down Internet access will cause even more protests in that country. Certainly we have seen the Internet, especially access to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, generate what is being called the "Arab Spring" in the Middle East where long running dictatorships in countries like Egypt and Tunisia have been overthrown. The civil war in Libya is also a direct cause of "Arab Spring" along with mass protests in many other Middle Eastern countries including Syria.

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[nsane.forums]

Syria Internet Service Said Restored

The Internet in Syria was back on Saturday, a day after it was reported that two-thirds of Syrian networks had been cut off from the rest of the world in the wake of civil unrest in the country.

The Internet shutdown was criticized on Saturday by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who issued a statement saying the U.S. was deeply concerned by reports that Internet service was unavailable across much of Syria, and that some mobile communication networks were offline as well. "We condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people's exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association," Clinton said in the statement.

Seven of the 40 networks that were earlier unreachable returned around 19:00 UTC (22:00 local time Friday night in Damascus). The development was reported by Renesys, a firm that studies Internet traffic flows, via its blog on Saturday. The rest came back shortly after 04:00 UTC (07:00 local time Saturday morning), it said.

Renesys reported on Friday that starting at 3:35 UTC (6:35 am local time) on that day, approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, it said.

The network prefixes that remained reachable include those belonging to the Syrian government, although many government websites were slow to respond or down, Renesys said.

The networks that were not reachable included the prefixes reserved for SyriaTel's 3G mobile data networks, and smaller downstream Internet service providers, Renesys said.

The shutdown seemed to be in anticipation of a crackdown on Friday that resulted in Syrian forces killing a large number of protesters, according to reports. Syrians have been protesting against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian officials were not immediately available for comment on the Internet cut.

Cutting off the Internet has become common in many parts of the world where governments are facing unrest, much of it planned over online social networks and messaging services.

Egypt cut off its Internet connections from the rest of the world in January after protests broke out in the country. In February, the Libyan government resorted to similar tactics.

If Egypt and Libya's Internet outages are any guide, one might conclude that events on the street in Syria are reaching a tipping point, Renesys analyst James Cowie said on the blog on Friday.

View: Original Article

[bashar]

well , i knew they're going to do that but never expect that soon

maybe now they will try to cut internet every-friday (actually maintenance doesn't happen but on fridays :P )

Welcome back internet , hope they wont do it for more than one day ^_^