Restoration in Syria

Renesys confirms a largely complete restoration of the Syrian Internet this morning, starting at 14:32:10 UTC (16:32 local time in Damascus).

Transit providers for the full prefix set do not appear to be significantly changed, with Internet service being provided post-restoration by Telecom Italia, Tata Communications, Turk Telecom, and PCCW.

Here’s a view of live Syrian prefix counts during the outage and restoration, from 29 November to 1 December:

And here’s a zoom into the same data, during the period of the restoration:
Syrian upstream providers post-restoration look much as they did before the outage; Turk Telekom’s restoration appears to have been delayed by an hour relative to the other providers.

The restoration was achieved just as quickly and neatly as the outage: like a switch being thrown. 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.

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