Yesterday afternoon, at around 2:45pm EDT, Syria disappeared off the Internet. According to Threatpost, this was a result of the country's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes being severed.
This meant that, effectively, Syria was unable to communicate with the rest of the world; however, it has not been reported whether the outage affected Syria's Internet communication within its borders.
Yet, almost as quickly as it vanished, the beleaguered country came back online the following morning.
This isn't the first time the country has gone offline. It lost connectivity in November 2012, too. The ongoing conflict in Syria has been widely reported. It began on 15 March 2011, as a result of tensions between forces loyal to the Syrian Ba'ath Party government and those wishing to supplant it, namely the Syrian National Coalition, a mix of militias.
The outage was first reported by Umbrella Security Labs, which said resolvers belonging to its parent company, OpenDNS, saw a 'significant drop' in traffic from Syria. It added that neither of Syria's top-level domains could be reached during the outage, which lasted just under 20 hours.
According to Umbrella Security CTO Dan Hubbard: "Shutting down Internet access to and from Syria is achieved by withdrawing the BGP routes from Syrian prefixes."
Internet traffic routing is reliant on BGP, the protocol that is used to make core routing decisions, and sees that Internet-connected routers know how to connect IP addresses. Should an IP range go dark, it is taken off the BGP routes, which lets the routers know that those specific IPs are unreachable.
According to Hubbard, there were a mere three routes in the BGP routing tables for Syria, dropping from its usual 80 or so.
Hubbard concluded: "Although we can't yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fibre cuts and power outages."
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