An unexpected Internet blackout in Syria left people without access for more than seven hours. The government says it was a technical glitch, while a European rebel group claims responsibility.
Several Internet monitoring companies Thursday, reported a sudden drop in online activity in Syria. The outage, which lasted for more than seven hours, follows a string of similar blackouts in the country since May last year, when the Internet outage swept the entire country for about eight hours. According to an internet monitoring firm, Renesys, the outage started at around 8:30 a.m. ET (12:30 p.m. UTC), Thursday, affecting 95 percent of the country.
Renesys, the monitoring firm, tweeted a graph representing the Internet outage in Syria, which showed the connection between Turkey and Syria's largest city Aleppo remained unaffected.
Internet in Syria almost entirely down at 12:26 UTC. Only Aleppo link to Turkey remains connected. pic.twitter.com/o6flIEbkVy
- Renesys Corporation (@renesys) March 20, 2014
Renesys later updated the official Twitter account with the Internet status being restored across the country at 3:07 p.m. ET (19:07 UTC), Washington Post reports.
Internet in Syria restored at 19:07 UTC following blackout lasting over 7hrs. https://t.co/fOea6oUNtB - Renesys Corporation (@renesys) March 20, 2014
Groups like Anonymous and the Syrian Electronic Army have earlier waged attacks on Syria's internet. But the latest blackout has two different plaintiffs. According to a message posted on Pastebin, a rebel group calling itself the "European Cyber Army" claimed responsibility for the massive blackout. The post said that the attack was in response to the hacks done by the SEA on US and other European websites over the past couple of months.
"The United States of American is an unfortunate ally of the European Union, meaning any attack against the US is a direct attack or Threat against us!..." the message read. "We had warned SEA that this would happened! They ignored our warning and continued to strike American and European targets! SEA is a grave threat.....A threat that must be neutralized before it spreads like a disease!"
On the other hand, the Syrian government released a statement through the country's state-owned Syrian Arab News Agency that the Internet outage was not a result of any hack attack. According to the government, "regional and international communications and Internet network were cut off in all the provinces due to a breakdown in the optical fiber cable."
