Syria back online

Syria returned to the Internet on Sunday after a two-day blackout thought to be the work of the al-Assad government.

Reuters reported early Sunday AEDT that Internet service had returned to the capital, Damascus, and also to the central city of Homs as well most provinces.

Networking monitoring service Renesys noted that service started to be restored in a similar timeframe (about 1.30am Sunday AEDT), with routes coming through via Telecom Italia, Tata, Turktel and PCCW.

The Syrian Ministry of Communications and Technology apologised for the 52-hour long Internet outage for the country, saying it was caused by one of the main fibre optic rings linking southern Damascus with the rest of the nation.

A statement published by the government controlled Syrian Radio and Television stated that the break happened in the Damascus area, the country's capital and led to the international gateway there losing connectivity with the Internet.

The ministry acknowledged that the interruption caused "major upheaval" for national and international telecommunications as well as mobile service in Damascus and in the provinces.

According to the ministry, engineers worked around the clock under difficult conditions to repair the fault and to restore service.

It is currently looking to implement an unspecified alternative solution that will allow faster restoration in case of future disruptions.

In an analysis, web performance and security firm Cloudflare points out that Syria has four physical cables that connect it to the rest of the world.

Three are undersea, landing in the city of Tartus. A fourth goes overland through Turkey.

In a related development, on Saturday, Anonymous waded in and threatened to attack Syrian government websites in retaliation for the Internet blackout.

The hacker collective said it won't attack sites inside Syria however, but promised to focus on embassy sites outside the country. 

Anonymous also clarified via Twitter that it's not going after the Syrian government sites in support of the rebel Free Syrian Army.

No reports have been received of Syrian embassy sites being inaccessible or defaced at the time of publication.