We can confirm reports of significant
but sporadic Internet outages in the Palestinian Territories today. As many as
half of the routed networks of the Palestinian Territories were unreachable (withdrawn
from the global routing table), possibly as a result of reported
cyber attacks. These outages are the largest we
have observed all year for this country, which normally has a fairly stable
Internet. Impacted networks are located in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The vast majority of the 182 affected networks were customers of incumbent provider Paltel (AS12975). Fusion Services (AS42314) and Call U Communications (AS51440), which have independent international Internet transit, were also impacted. Additionally, some networks in Israel disappeared and recovered at the exact same times as Palestinian ones, suggesting problems with a common infrastructure.
Finally,
we have observed a pattern of reduced connectivity in our traceroute
data, which depicts a partial loss of connectivity via active
measurements. In the graph below, we plot the number of completed
traceroutes from our servers around the world to Paltel networks. Each
color represent a different Paltel Internet provider used to reach local
networks. The largest drop off occurred via Israeli provider Bezeqint (AS8551).
At the time of this writing, these networks have been restored. We will update this blog post if further major outages occur or as new information becomes available.
Why do you think this is a Cyber attack? Could it be just a 'regular' outage?
Author's note: We are only confirming significant outages in Palestinian networks which were widely reported to be targets of cyber attack.