Syria back online after two-day internet blackout

Internet access was restored to the people of Syria on Saturday, ending a two-day blackout.

The country, which is engaged in a civil war, saw connectivity end on Thursday. This appeared to have been the result of the systematic removal of channels from the edge routers that sit at the borders of the country's core networks.

Mid-afternoon on Saturday, Damascus time, border gateway protocol (BGP) messages began emanating from Syria again, announcing the reconnection of the country.

Although the regime of president Bashar al-Assad had claimed that the disconnection was the result of 'terrorists' cutting cables', internet monitoring firm Renesys said the way in which Syria came back online suggested otherwise. However, the firm warned against coming to firm conclusions at this point.

"The restoration was achieved just as quickly and neatly as the outage: like a switch being thrown," Renesys wrote. "Does that mean that we believe the government (or the opposition) threw the switch? Frankly, the data available just don't support attribution at this point, despite all the speculation.

"The only way we're going to know for sure will be to wait for a resolution to the conflict, at which point we will hear from the people who know for sure: the network engineers in Syria. We hope they're safe and we look forward to hearing their story firsthand."

The blackout made it difficult for the outside world to tell what was going on inside Syria, although the BBC reported the continuation of heavy fighting in the capital and elsewhere.