Syria Has Dropped Off the Internet, Again

Internet traffic into and out of Syria has ground to a halt again.

The last time this happened, the folks at Renesys, a research firm that tracks the health of the Internet’s underlying plumbing, noticed that all five networks bringing Internet traffic into Syria went down more or less at once. There are four physical cables that bring bandwidth into Syria and three of them land in the coastal city of Tartus. A fourth comes in from Turkey to the north. Chances are routers in the telecommunications building were reconfigured to stop announcing themselves in the global routing tables, essentially making them invisible to the rest of the Internet. The question — as with last time this happened — is why now?