Internet Servers Are Running But Libya Goes Dark

Libya lost Internet connectivity again on March 3, according to multiple traffic monitors.

Search queries to Google and YouTube traffic both flat-lined starting about 16:00 GMT, or 19:00 local time on March 3, and this has continued since, according to the Google Transparency Report. Interestingly, there had been a dramatic increase in YouTube traffic in the days just before the cut-off.

Selective Shutdown Blocks Most Traffic

Traffic monitoring firm Renesys started receiving reports March 4 that Libyans in Tripoli were unable to use the Internet, but saw nothing unusual in the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing table, wrote James Cowie, the chief technology officer of Renesys, on the company’s blog tracking Libya’s outage. “All Libyan routes up and stable,” he wrote.

However, trace routes indicated there was no data-packet traffic flowing on the otherwise open routes. Renesys tried several Web sites known to be hosted in Libya, including government Web sites, and got no response, Cowie said.

“It’s like a post-apocalyptic scenario where the roads are there, there just isn’t any traffic,” Cowie told the International Business Times.

Lights On But Nobody’s Home

Libya went dark on February 19 and February 20 for about seven hours each day in a regular pattern that implied a curfew rather than a total blackout. Like the Egypt shutdown, Libyan ISPs just turned off their servers to prevent people from going online. The current shutdown is different because servers are up and responding to “ping” requests, said Cowie.

Instead, Libyan telecommunications operators appear to be throttling down the network bandwidth to restrict traffic, much in the same way the ISP would cut off users when they exceeded their monthly data limit, Cowie said.

The chairman of Libya Telecom & Technology, the country’s leading ISP, is none other than Muhammad Gadhafi, the eldest son of president Moammar Gadhafi.

The current outage follows weeks of reduced traffic volumes, according to Arbor Networks, which monitors global Internet traffic using data from more than 100 ISPs in its Atlas network.

Sporadic Tweet Phone Service

While shutting down servers and withdrawing the BGP routes is basically hitting an Internet kill-switch, Libya’s latest technique is more analogous to a strong firewall rule. Even though most of the population cannot get online, the technique theoretically allows some systems and users, Moammar Gadhafi, for example, to continue using the Internet.

During the Egyptian shutdown, Google enabled a “speak to tweet” service that allowed users to call a phone number that would appear on Twitter. There has been no such service announced for Libya. It may not be as effective, as mobile phones have been working sporadically for at least a week, according to Al-Jazeera.

As before, there are a number of alternatives being shared on Twitter for Libyans to get online, such as a free dial-up account provided by organisations in Europe. XS4ALL, a “hacker-friendly” Internet service provider based in the Netherlands, opened up its modem lines for free during the previous curfew, but there had been no activity from Libya on the account, XS4ALL’s Niels Huijbregts told eWEEK.