Sophos Cloud Optix
It looks like internet access into and out of Syria has been deliberately shut down.
Just take a look at this traffic graph from Akamai, showing a dramatic and abrupt change at about 18:45 UTC.
Umbrella Security Labs report that Syria’s two TLD servers – ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.sy – are unreachable.
Sure enough, if you try to reach Syrian websites right now – you’ll probably find it impossible.
It’s not clear what has caused the problem, but there will no doubt be speculation as to whether the country’s rulers chose to unplug themselves from the net for reasons best known to themselves.
It’s bad news, of course, for those wanting to see what is happening in the country – and for those inside Syria who wish to communicate with the outside world.
To be flippant for a second, this outage might at least shed some light as to whether the Syrian Electronic Army (who have been causing quite a nuisance by hacking media organisations lately) are *really* based in Syria, or not as some tend to suspect…
Apparently there was a brief outage about the same time for Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and possibly Michigan… hiccup from Syria going poof, or?
Seems to be fine now. The Internet is really really great!
Well it is up right now. I was very interested, then disappointed.
The connection is being put back up.
As of 11:10 a.m. EDT (U.S.), BBC News reported that Syrian internet connectivity had been restored after a 19-hour blackout.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22447…
The article points out that the "official" reason for the blackout given by the Syrian state (failure of an optical cable) is unlikely to have brought down the entire system.
Speculation that the blackout was political in nature is plentiful, but at this time no one seems to know for certain what actually caused the outage.
I tried and all is well!