The Syrian Minister of Information is reported as saying that the government did not disable the Internet, but instead the outage was caused by a cable being cut. He's lying.
The exclusive provider of Internet access in Syria is the state-run Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. Their network AS number is AS29386. The following network providers typically provide connectivity from Syria to the rest of the Internet: PCCW and Turk Telekom as the primary providers with Telecom Italia and TATA for additional capacity.
When the outage happened, the BGP routes to Syrian IP space were all simultaneously withdrawn from all of Syria's upstream providers. The effect of this is that networks were unable to route traffic to Syrian IP space, effectively cutting the country off the Internet.
Syria has four physical cables that connect it to the rest of the Internet. Three are undersea cables that land in the city of Tartous, Syria. The fourth is an over-land cable through Turkey. In order for a whole-country outage, all four of these cables would have had to been cut simultaneously. "That is unlikely to have happened," CloudFlare says.
CloudFlare diplomatically says they "don't believe our role is to take sides in political conflicts."
"However, we do believe it is our mission to build a better Internet where everyone can have a voice and access information," CloudFlare also says.
Indeed. And that's why allowing governments to control the flow of information on the Internet is such a bad idea.
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