Syria is not exactly the shining example of being a stable country at this point in time, not to mention the fact that the Syrian electronic army recently hacked 11 Twitter accounts belonging to the Guardian. Having said that, it seems that Syria’s Internet connection to the rest of the world has been interrupted, at least this is what can be gathered according to Google data as well as other global Internet companies. Google’s Transparency Report pages pointed out that traffic to Google services pages from the country which has been knee deep in a civil war which has dragged on for more than a couple of years already, stopped abruptly before 3pm EDT (19h00 GMT), and there were no additional activity for approximately four hours after the initial drop-off happened.
Christine Chen, Google’s senior manager for free expression, said, “We’ve seen this twice before. This happened in Syria last November and in Egypt during the Arab Spring.” It is more or less an impossible task to know the reason behind such a disruption, unless someone or a party claims responsibility, but hopefully, Syrians will be able to get back on track – at least their online lives, sooner rather than later.
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