Bangalore: Syria was literally cut off from the outside world on Tuesday with not even a single data packet transferred through internet, according to a number of monitoring companies including Google and other global Internet companies, prompting speculation that the apparent blackout was an attempt by the Syrian government to disrupt the online activities of opponents, reports The Guardian.

The search giant said that its services in the country were inaccessible and the data showed traffic disruptions limited to Syria and spanning the entire country. Since IP addresses, individual connections established by each device are geographically specific and the government has control over Syria’s Internet service providers, shutting an entire nation from the Internet is quite easy.

Last November, monitoring companies reported a similar blackout in Syria, where videos were uploaded repeatedly on YouTube by activists to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. In order to testify about attacks by government forces on rebel civilians, activists used internet telephony products such as Skype and the government blamed “terrorists” for the disconnection in November.

The apparent blackout was reported by Renesys, an internet monitoring service which carried the news on disconnection in November. Last year, Renesys pointed out that certain Syrian web servers had survived the November outrage as they were located “offshore”. Those web servers were used to target Syrian activists with malware targeting Skype.

The Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak cut the country’s internet connection with the rest of the world in January 2011 especially when the protests were growing to next levels. The outrage lasted a week, but never prevented the ousting of Mubarak.

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