Syrian Internet comes back to life after a 19-hour blackout

The Internet is now up and running in Syria after a good 19 hours of blackout in the country. Connectivity across the country went down on Tuesday at around

Nishtha Kanal|May 09, 2013, 09:15:08 IST

The Internet is now up and running in Syria after a good 19 hours of blackout in the country. Connectivity across the country went down on Tuesday at around 11:30 PM IST and was up and running on Wednesday around 7:30 PM IST.

Internet monitoring company Renesys reported in a blog post that web services had been restored in Syria. “Syrian Internet is returning. First probes making it through, routing restoration in progress,” the company also tweeted from the official account. Other monitoring companies followed suit by announcing that Syrian Internet connectivity was now back on.

More importantly, Google, who’s Transparency Report documents Internet accessibility and connectivity around the world has removed Syria from the list of countries where service disruptions are supposed to be ongoing. Home to most Internet subscribers in the country! (Image credit: Getty Images)

Home to most Internet subscribers in the country! (Image credit: Getty Images)

Back up and running (Image credit: Getty Images)

While it is still not officially confirmed what the cause behind this massive Internet outage was, the state-run Syrian-Arab News Agency (SANA) was spotted citing that it was because of an optic cable malfunction. “Internet services back to normal across Syria after repairing optic cable malfunction,” SANA wrote on its website.

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Syria has been facing an upheaval with the civil war in progress. Cutting off internet connectivity has become a tool in the hands of both the government and the rebels over the past year. Besides Internet connectivity, telephone lines have been cut off periodically too.

Another incident of this sort in November last year saw an Internet blackout in the country for nearly three days. Outages in Syria have been seen to be lasting anytime between less than an hour to over two days in the past year.

By Nishtha Kanal

Intrigued by all things social, Nishtha will invariably tweet about you. When not tweeting or writing about the next viral video, you will hear her proclaiming her love to Metallica, James Hetfield, Opeth, Akerfeldt and all bands that go 'growl'. She also obsesses about ACP Pradyuman and South Park and you will always find her moving around with a book. Her focus is on all the happening stuff in the tech domain, and she won't hesitate to take a shot at some of the oddball devices that make their way to our labs.