Syrian internet service back on-line

The Syrian internet service was said to be restored on Saturday, a day after two-thirds of the Syrian network had been disconnected amidst the civil unrest in the country, a report said.

The internet shutdown was criticized on Saturday by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who declared that the US condemned Syria’s effort to suppress the country’s people from exercising their rights to freedom of expression.

“The Syrian Internet is back up. Seven of the 40 networks returned around 19:00 UTC (22:00 local time Friday night). The rest came back shortly after 04:00 UTC (07:00 local time Saturday morning),” said Renesys, an Internet monitoring organization. “With connectivity restored, the Google Transparency Report confirms that traffic has resumed, at levels that look provisionally similar to those before the blackout.”

The only accessible network prefixes accessible were the ones which belonged to the Syrian government. Prefixes including those of SyriaTel's 3G mobile data networks, an internet service provided, also remained disconnected, the company report said.