Internet Coming Back to Syria

After about 20 hours, the Internet is coming back on in the war-torn nation of Syria.

The change has been reported by two organizations: Syria Digital Reports, a project of Canada’s SecDev organization; and BGPmon, a company which monitors the Border Gateway Protocol information of the Internet’s underlying infrastructure. They both have noticed the country’s Internet connections humming back to life within the last hour.

BGPmon tweeted the following graphic that it says shows the country’s routing infrastructure coming back online:

Google’s Transparency report data is also ticking upward.

Meanwhile, there has been at least one vague claim that the loss of connectivity wasn’t the result of a Syrian government order. It comes from Anonymous, the loose affiliation of hackers who are better known for making noise and calling attention to themselves than for actually hacking anything in a meaningful way. I’ll believe it when I see some convincing evidence, so take this one with a grain of salt, but here’s its latest tweet on the subject:

Clarification: I revised the story above to clear up any implication I may have made that the SecDev Organization’s Syria Digital Reports project is connected to BGPmon. They’re not connected, but the way I initially wrote it made it seem that they were. Sorry about that.