Syria has effectively been removed from the internet with all 84 of its IP addresses being unreachable today.The outage shows no signs of stopping and a country already torn apart by Civil War is now left digitally isolated from the world.
As Steven Musil for CNET reports, online hacktivist group Anonymous blames Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the outage and has pledged to strip the government of all its web assets as a response.
Determining that the Syrian government was responsible for the country's Internet blackout, the online hacktivist group Anonymous has announced a campaign against Syrian government Web sites hosted outside the country.
The Middle Eastern country began experiencing an Internet outage earlier today, and many people on Twitter reported that phone lines are down as well. All 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet, according to Renesys, which operates a real-time grid that continuously monitors Internet routing data.
Anonymous said it had conducted an "exhaustive analysis" of the blackout and determined that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had severed fiber-optic and coaxial cables going into Syria.
"Essentially, they have physically 'pulled the plug out of the wall,'" Anonymous said in a press release. "As we discovered in Egypt, where the dictator Mubarak did something similar -- this is not damage that can be easily or quickly repaired."
Characterizing the outage as a "desperate move by a dying regime," Anonymous said it would be begin a campaign at 6 p.m. PT dubbed "Operation Syria" to remove all Web assets belonging to Assad's government hosted outside the country.
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