Syrian Government's Explanation for Internet Outage Questioned

Syria experienced a near total Internet blackout for 19 hours yesterday, and today the government said the outage stemmed from a cut cable, an explanation that security company CloudFlare called “highly unlikely.”

“Syria’s network connects to the rest of the Internet at four distinct points that are geographically separated. For traffic to be terminated entirely, all four connection points would need to be severed simultaneously,” the company explained in a blog post on the incident.

Further, CloudFlare argues a few IP addresses remained functional during the outage, which couldn’t be the case if a cable had been cut.