Syria back online after day-long disconnect

War riven Syria disappeared off the internet yesterday, in a move that was thought to be a blackout to hide an unspecified government security forces operation against rebels in the country's bloody civil war.

The government controlled Syria Arab News Agency (SANA) reported the outage was caused by  "a malfunction in an optic cable".

Syria's minister of Communications and Technology, Imad al-Sabouni, told SANA that the internet services and communications were restored throughout the country on Wednesday afternoon local time.

However, content delivery network provider Cloudflare noted that "it appears that someone systematically withdrew the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes from the country's border routers."

Provider Renesys confirmed the outage saying "he entire nation disappeared from the internet in 30 seconds, as if a switch had been thrown."

Google also reported the outage in its Transparency Report, saying all its products were inaccessible in Syria for more than 19 hours.

Syria has been fully disconnected from the internet several times, and networks in the country disappeared from the global routing table in November last year for three days.