Amid fighting between the government and Free Syrian Army, reports are emerging that Syria has been cut off from the internet as of 10.30am today (12.30pm Irish time).
Internet intelligence firm Renesys issued a bulletin stating that 77 networks in Syria have experienced an outage, which represents 92pc of the routed networks in the country. All of these networks access the internet via Syrian Telecommunications Establishment.
Later, Akamai, who produces a quarterly ‘State of the Internet’ report, verified Renesys’s findings tweeting that “Syria is effectively off the Internet” along with the graph below, showing the distinct drop-off in internet traffic from the country.
The situation is being compared to an outage across Egypt during the Egyptian revolution in 2011. As with other revolutions that stemmed from the Arab Spring, the internet has played a key role among those fighting in Syria, with both sides targeting the web resources of the opposition.
Graph by @akamai_soti on Twitter
Syria image via Shutterstock
