Syria Civil War: Assad Regime Shuts off Internet Access

According to reports from within the country, the Syrian government has completely shut down internet access, in an apparent bid to curb the activities of the rebels.

Online research firm Renesys and numerous reports on Twitter claim that Syria's international internet connectivity has been shut down.

Renesys said: "In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the internet."

An updated blog stated: "77 networks experienced an outage in Syria starting at 10:26 UTC on November 29. This represents 92 percent of the routed networks in the country."

It is likely that only the government has the ability to shut down 92 percent of the networks within Syria, ruling out the possibility of an accident.

However this has happened before, but only for a brief period. On July 19 this year, access to the internet was cut off for most people within Syria, when all networks routed through the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment were withdrawn from the global routing table.

Shutting off access to the internet became a common tactic for governments during the Arab Spring. Both the Tunisian and Egyptian governments blocked access to the web during uprisings in their countries.

However, groups such as Anonymous and others have helped provide alternative routes to getting online for people on the ground, using dial-up modems in order to help spread news of what was happening on the ground to the wider world.

The Twitter hashtag #InternetCutInSyria suggests access to the web has been unavailable for four hours at the time of publication.