[liberationtech] Syrian Internet Is Off The Air

[Joel Harding]

 Internet Is Off The Air

By James Cowie on November 29, 2012 8:31 AM

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/syria-off-the-air.shtml

Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria's international
Internet connectivity shut down.   In the global routing table, all 84
of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively
removing the country from the Internet.

We are investigating the dynamics of the outage and will post updates
as they become available.

Update (15:45 UTC)

Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can
see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would
expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is
the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer
networks are currently unreachable.

Now, there are a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the
Internet, still reachable by traceroutes, and indeed still hosting
Syrian content. These are five networks that use Syrian-registered IP
space, but the originator of the routes is actually Tata
Communications. These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic,
and perhaps not subject to whatever killswitch was thrown today within
Syria.

These five offshore survivors include the webservers that were
implicated in the delivery of malware targeting Syrian activists in
May of this year.

It has been a crazy year for Syrian Internet transit arrangements,
most recently with the loss of Deutsche Telekom as a transit provider
earlier this month.