The internet in Syria has suffered a complete blackout, according to monitoring companies including RIPE NCC and Akami, as well as other internet-based companies such as Rensys and Google.
The outage, which began at 18.48 GMT on 7 May and continues at the time of publication, has led to speculation the Syrian authorities may have cut access in order to disrupt the online activities of those opposed to the incumbent regime.
"The details of the situation in Syria are still unknown, but we're deeply concerned that this blackout is a deliberate attempt to silence Syria's online communications," said Anas Qtiesha and Rainey Reitman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a blog post.
Dan Hubbard, CTO of Umbrella Security Labs, explained that the outage in Syria has been caused by the withdrawal of Boarder Gateway Protocols (BGP) from the country's routers.
"BGP distributes routing information and makes sure all routers on the internet know how to get to a certain IP address. When an IP range becomes unreachable it will be withdrawn from BGP, this informs routers that the IP range is no longer reachable," he said in a blog post, adding that there are currently three routes in the BGP routing tables for Syria, whereas normally there would be around 80.
"Syria has largely disappeared from the internet," Hubbard said.
The Syrian state news agency Sana is reporting the outage is due to a "fault in optical fibre cables" and that work is ongoing to try and rectify the problem, according to the BBC.
However, David Belson, product line director for custom analytics at Akamai told the BBC this was "unlikely ... [as] Syria's international internet connectivity is delivered through at least four providers, and published submarine cable maps show connectivity through three active cables.
"As such, the failure of a single optical cable is unlikely to cause a complete outage for the country," he said.
Hubbard, on the other hand, did not rule out the possibility of cable-cutting, although he suggested it may not be an innocent case of faulty infrastructure if so.
"It's unclear whether internet communication within Syria is still available. Although we can't yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fibre cuts and power outages," he said.
