Introduction
February 2011 saw much instability in North African and Middle Eastern countries including Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain, Libya, and Morocco. In some of these countries such as Egypt and Libya there were overt efforts to limit Internet access. It is interesting to see the consequent impact of Internet performance to these countries.
Egypt
See Egypt shuts down their Internet
Libya
PingER monitors 3 hosts in Libya. Below we see smokeping plots of their performance around the 19 February. The plots show the loss rate (black = no access) as the background color, the blue line shows the median Round Trip Time (RTT) with the gray shading showing the jitter. The first major outage occurs for all 3 hosts between midnight and 0600hrs GMT on February 19th.
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hn.ly appeared to again be reachable on April 27, 2011. However there was further outage on May 8th 2011 when the RTT dropped from ~ 200ms to ~ 75ms as seen from SLAC. Since such an RTT is not possible between SLAC and Libya, it appears there is a proxy probably somewhere in N. America.
Yemen
www.queenscollege.edu.ye in the capital of Yemen, Sanaa, was no longer accessible from May 16th to May 22 2011. The diurnal variation after May 22nd was less than before the outage, possibly indicating less congestion due to lighter Internet use. www.adencomplex.com.ye in Aden City saw a similar pattern of accessibility.
Syria
On 6/3/2011 CNN reported, and James Cowie of Renesys — an oft-quoted source during the Egypt revolution and the Internet shutdown there in January blogged that only networks belonging to the Syrian government are still reachable (see here). The Internet was restored on June 4th 2011.
PingER monitors two hosts in Syria: www.inp.org.sy (bills itself as Syria's Information point) and www.inet.sy bill's iself as iNET and located at Al-Mohajreen, Damascus, Syria P.O.Box 3523). They are both located in Damascus. Both were responding to pings as of 23:30 June 2nd, 2011. As of June 3rd we were not able to ping www.inet.sy. However www.inp.org.sy was still responding. on June 5y we looked at the time series for the two hosts seen from SLAC (see below). Both were inaccessible for a few hours on either the 2nd or 3rd of June. However the two outages did not coincide.
Algeria, Bahrain, Morocco, Tunisia
We have not seen inaccessibility of hosts in these countries as of the end of February 20th 2011. SLAC monitors 3 hosts in Morocco. Below we see the Smokeping plots for the Moroccan hosts up to when we gathered the data (midnight + 1 second GMT time 2/21/2011).
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