Introduction
Starting at 10:26 UTC on Thursday, 29 November (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria's international Internet connectivity shut down.
PingER was monitoring 2 hosts in Syria. They were "Thawra online publishing for the press" in Damascus and to INET also in Damascus.
A Google map of Damascus showing the two sites (green balloons) and identifying the Thawra host is shown below;
PingER measurements
Disappearance
The PingER half hourly measurements, from SLAC to "Thawra online publishing for the press" in Damascus and to INET also in Damascus, are shown below using the Smokeping facility.
Thawra Online (last 3 days) |
iNET (last 3 days) |
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Thawra Online (last 120 days) |
iNET (last 120 days) |
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The unreachability (black bars in the 3 days plot) starting around 11:00am on November 29th are clearly visible. We will continue to monitor to see if and when reachability is resumed.
The black bars around 2012-08-21, 2012-09-08 and 2012-11-13 were SLAC PingER monitoring host outages.
Looking at the 120 days graphs it is seen that there were increased losses (increase in yellow background colors) starting around 2012-09-20 in both cases. More recently (see the 3 days plots) these increased for a while to over 20% (more red background colors).
The host names were unresolvable at 2100 11/29/2012, so we could not try a traceroute. PingER does collect traceroutes on a daily basis. The traceroutes for Nov. 28th indicate both host have the same route until hop (there is no information beyond this hop). The route passes from SLAC (in Menlo Park, CA) to ESnet (in Sunnyvale) to Equinix onto BTN in London and ending at iNET in Syria.
The IP address of iNET (91.144.8.211 BGP 91.144.0.0/18) belongs to the Autonomous System (AS) EXT-PDN-STE-AS Syrian Telecommunications Establishment
Re-appearance
PingER was able to reach the hosts again around 14:30, Dec 1st 2012 GMT. They were unreachable for just over 2 days. The re-appearance of these two host is shown below. A period of high loss is seen after the restoration.
Thawra online |
iNET |
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Longer term
In the plots below we compare the performance of the 2 Syrian hosts with that for some of the other hosts monitored by PingER in the Middle East.
It is seen that there were outagesof the monitoring host (pinger.slac.stanford.edu) on 11/13/2012 and again on 12/21/2012 that resulted in no data (black background)for all hosts.It is also seen that there were 2 other outages of www.inet.sy on and that only affected it, and then there was the outage starting 11/29/2012 that affected both www/thawra.sy and www.inet.sy. It is alos seen that there was a lot of instability resulting losses and large diurnal changes in RTT from Sepmeber onwards. This seems to have improved since December.