Recently in Middle East Category

As the conflict in Syria continues unabated, we have observed an increase in the number of significant Internet outages in this war-torn country in the past six weeks. We first commented on the situation last year and again last month.

On Saturday, August 18th, the Syrian incumbent and sole domestic provider, Syria Telecommunications Establishment (STE, AS 29386), withdrew all 61 of its networks from the global routing table for roughly 17 minutes, starting at 07:59:00 UTC. Then again, on Sunday, August 19th, 20 of these networks were down several times between 04:00 UTC and 07:51:30 UTC. Sky News reporter, Tim Marshall, sent the tweet on the right from Syria at August 18th, 10:33 PST (or August 19th, 05:33 UTC).

In addition to frequent and substantial outages, we have also observed a dramatic shift in the telecommunications operators providing service to Syria. Until a few days ago, the incumbent in neighboring Turkey, Turk Telecom (AS 9121), was a major provider to STE and thus to all of Syria. The illustration on the right displays a weighted view of STE routes to its international carriers over time. Turk Telecom disappeared briefly on August 3rd and then permanently on August 12th.

Meanwhile, Telecom Italia's (AS 6762) portion of Syrian transit has dropped significantly, suggesting that they could be next to leave the country. With Turk Telecom's departure and Telecom Italia fading, Hong Kong-based PCCW is currently carrying the lion's share of Internet traffic into Syria through their Mediterranean assets.

It is important to note that sanctions prevent US telecommunications firms from doing business in Syria, limiting STE's choices (US carriers, Level 3 and Cogent, are major providers in neighboring Lebanon). Are other countries now simply following suit? Or are these changes the result of physical infrastructure damage? China, with strong economic ties to Syria, has imposed no such sanctions. Interestingly, with the diminishing role of western carriers, PCCW is left as a primary means for the Syrian people to document the ongoing conflict, such as via timely YouTube videos. Ultimately, telecommunications bans could prove counterproductive if they end up placing barriers to the free flow of information.

At 10:28 UTC today, Jordanian incumbent, Orange Jordan (AS 8697), suffered a wide-spread Internet outage, lasting 2 hours and 16 minutes. Orange dropped service to 241 of the 244 networks it typically routes, temporarily erasing nearly 60% of Jordanian cyberspace.

The impact of the outage extended beyond the incumbent's borders to Orange Jordan's sole customer in Iraq, EarthLink (AS 50710). This provider lost service to 11 of its networks or 6% of its total, namely, those transiting Orange to reach the global Internet.

For about 40 minutes today, all networks routed through the Syrian incumbent, Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (AS29256 and AS29386), were withdrawn from the global routing table, effectively cutting off most of Syria from the Internet.

It has been a tough week for Internet connectivity in Lebanon. After two national Internet blackouts on the IMEWE cable, Lebanese traffic was moved onto the CADMOS submarine cable to reach international carriers via Cyprus. With this backup in place, and with substantial additional capacity brought online to reduce congestion, just over 70% of the country's networks (prefixes) were brought back online.

In an example of engineering under pressure, Lebanese Telecoms Minister Nicholas Sehnaoui personally flew to Cyprus and met with the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority. The teams (pictured right) then collaborated to find a viable solution.

Prior to the recent activation of Internet service to Lebanon via the IMEWE submarine cable, Internet service in Lebanon was labeled the "world's slowest" due to its dependence on a combination of antiquated submarine cables built in the mid-1990's and high-latency satellite service. However, as high-speed Internet service via IMEWE expanded in recent months, today's outage reveals Lebanon's new dependence on this lone modern connection to the outside world.

For almost three hours today, Lebanon experienced a near complete nationwide Internet outage. Between 16:13 and 18:59 UTC, we observed as many as 842 of the approximately 900 routed prefixes in Lebanon withdrawn from the global routing table, as illustrated in the graphic on the right. During this period of time, we saw almost every routed prefix downstream of incumbent Liban (AS42020) withdrawn. At 17:45 UTC, we saw these networks restored only to be withdrawn once again minutes later.