Paint it black: How Syria methodically erased itself from the 'Net'

ust after noon Damascus time on Thursday, the government-owned Syrian Telecommunications Establishment essentially deleted the whole country from the Internet's routing tables, blocking all inbound and outbound network traffic. Rather than the result of terrorist attacks, as the government claimed on state television, the blackout was a well-rehearsed and deliberate act intended to deny connection to Syria's citizens and the opposition forces currently trying to topple the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad.

Five Syrian networks, identified by their IP address prefixes, were reachable over the network connections of Indian telecom provider Tata Communications until late Thursday. The Syrian government's previous network monitoring company, BGPMon, reported that the country was 100 percent offline by 1:45 AM Damascus time Friday morning, until 4:30 PM on December 1 when connections were restored. There were also reports of widespread landline and cellular phone service outages.

That didn't mean that there was no way for Syrian citizens to connect to the outside world. And the US State Department provided communications equipment to "dozens" of local councils in areas of Syria no longer under government control in order to bypass Syria's government-controlled networks.