Syrian Internet Cut Off During Protests

Syrian networks were reconnected to the Internet on Saturday, a day after two-thirds of the country’s networks were reportedly cut off.

The Internet shutdown coincided with what were reportedly some of the largest anti-government protests yet on Friday, in the course of which at least 40 protesters were killed, according to activists cited by the New York Times.

Cutoff

Renesys, a company that tracks Internet flows, reported on Friday that starting at 3:35 UTC about two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the wider Internet, with 40 of 59 networks withdrawn from the global routing table.

Some government network prefixes remained reachable, while networks belonging to SyriaTel’s 3G mobile data networks and smaller downstream Internet service providers were no longer reachable, according to Renesys.

Seven of the 40 unreachable networks then returned at around 19:00 UTC, or 22:00 Damascus time on Friday night, Renesys said. The remaining networks returned to connectivity shortly after 04:00 UTC.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement on Saturday criticising the the service interruption.

“We condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people’s exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association,” Clinton stated.

Several governments in the Middle East have cut off Internet service as part of their efforts to control protests, as Internet services – and notably social networking services – have grown in importance as tools for organising protests.

Egypt cut off its Internet service from the rest of the world in January during protests, while in February the Libyan government carried out a similar manoeuvre.

The Egyptian protests were partly inspired by a Facebook page set up by a Dubai-based Google executive.

The Egyptian government’s blocking of Internet services for five days is likely to have cost the country roughly $90 million (£56m), according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The blocked telecommunication and Internet services account for between three and four percent of Egypt’s GDP, equivalent to a loss of $18 million (£11m) per day. However, the OECD warns that the long-term impact could be far greater, as the cut-off could have deterred foreign investors from expanding their operations in Egypt.

Industry reaction

Ghoneim’s support was an out-of-hours activity, but Google itself helped the protesters by providing a service that would tweet messages sent by phone, after Egypt banned Twitter. Other social media giants also weighed in, with Facebook upgrading its security after it became known that the Tunisian government had tried to steal the passwords of all Facebook users.