Internet suspended in Syrian Arab Republic

Syrian Arab Republic (the)

9 June - 30 June, 2019 (22 days)

Local Impact

Simply put, June was a pretty rough month for the global Internet. In addition to all of the usual small/transient issues, there were quite a few significant disruptions that occurred over the course of the month. This month’s post covers government-mandated Internet shutdowns due to political unrest and national exams, disruptions due to cable damage, power outage-related Internet outages, two large route leaks, and a couple of localized disruptions (for good measure).

Cause Documentation

No cause documentation has been made public.

Data and Analysis

The first observed disruption, between 01:00 – 05:30 GMT on June 9, took place in conjunction with 712,000 university students starting their second term exams, along with 9th grade (O-Level) and 12th grade (A-Level) students starting public exams as well. Additional disruptions were also seen on June 11, 13, 17, and 19, all effectively appearing as complete country-wide outages in the Oracle Internet Intelligence, CAIDA IODA, and Google Transparency Report Traffic figures below.

Oracle Internet Intelligence Country Statistics graph for Syria, June 9-15, 2019

It is interesting to note that within the Oracle Internet Intelligence Map graphs, the Traceroute Completion Ratio and BGP Routes metrics drop to zero during the periods of disruption, but the DNS Query Rate metric spikes. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Oracle Internet Intelligence, explained why this happened:

https://twitter.com/DougMadory/status/1138064496008806400

Internet Shutdowns

Syrian Arab Republic (the)