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As of 10:27 UTC this morning the majority of the Internet in Syria is no longer connected to the rest of the world and can be considered as offline. Syria has only one major provider, AS29256 The Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. This provider is government owned and originates 56 out of 62 Syrian prefixes.
This morning between 10:26 and 10:27 all routes originated by AS29256 (The Syrian Telecommunications Establishment) were withdrawn and became unreachable.
The only Syrian prefixes left in the routing table are 5 prefixes originated by TATA, AS6453. These are the prefixes that are still reachable via TATA:
216.6.0.0/23, 63.243.163.0/24, 116.0.72.0/22, 66.198.39.0/24, 66.198.41.0/24
What happened?
We have no official confirmation about what happened, but similar events in the past [Syria, Egypt] were all government ordered. Because the primary telecom provider is state controlled in Syria, an outage like this is relatively easy to implement by ordering the primary telecom provider to shutdown the external links or BGP sessions with the external providers. External providers that provide services to Syria are:
AS9121 Turk Telecom
AS6762 telecom Italia
AS3491 PCCW Global
AS6453 Tata
Not the first outage