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© AkamaiAkami confirms traffic flow to Syria effectively ended at 10:30 AM eastern time
Syria has reportedly cut off all access to the Internet according to Akami and web monitoring firm Renesys. In a short blog post, Renesys said that "all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet. Monitoring firm Akamai has also confirmed that no traffic is getting in or out of Syria. The BBC is reporting the mobile service has also been cut off.

A Google Transparency Report page shows that Google traffic to Syria appears to have been cut off Thursday morning.

Deposed Egyptian president Hasni Mubarak famously cut off Internet and mobile phone service in Egypt at the height of the Arab Spring demonstrations that led to his ouster. Although he was successful in getting the Egyptian carriers to cooperate, some Egyptians still managed to get online by making international data calls from old-fashioned telephone modem lines.

According to Reuters, some Syrian activists have been using satellite phones, which can't be easily cut off by domestic authorities. A recent article in the Atlantic said that the U.S. State Department provided 900 satellite phones have been distributed "and 1,000 activists have been trained to use the equipment."

Doesn't work

Cutting off Internet access can backfire against a regime in more than one way. To begin with, it doesn't work. People still find ways to communicate internally and get word outside of the country. Second, it denies the regime the valuable intelligence it can get from monitoring people's Internet use as well as the government's ability to use the Internet for its own propaganda and to rally its own civilian supporters.

It is perhaps ironic that Syrian President Bashar Assad was once head of the Syrian Computer Society, which "undertook extensive projects to introduce and spread the use of computer technology and the internet in Syria," according to his biography on a United Nations website.

The Twitter hash tag #Syriablackout has been established for people wishing to track or make comments on this issue.

Update: Renesys reports that there are five Syrian networks that are still connected and speculates that "These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic, and perhaps not subject to whatever killswitch was thrown today within Syria."