On June 3, 2011, Syria turned off its people’s Internet connectivity. Syria’s dictatorship had had enough of its citizens’ self-reporting on the government’s attacks on them. But, then Syria turned the Internet back on. What happened?
As Renesys, an Internet analytics firm, reported, only those sites that belonged to the Syrian government, and not all of them, were still on the net after the shutdown hit on Friday. In particular, “The networks that are not reachable include, substantially, all of the prefixes reserved for SyriaTel’s 3G mobile data networks, and smaller downstream ISPs including Sawa, INET, and Runnet.” In short, the people’s Internet was blocked.