Internet monitoring companies say Syria’s Internet connectivity has been shutdown nationwide. Renesys, a U.S.-based network security firm that studies Internet disruptions, reports that about 6 hours ago (12:26pm in Damascus) Syria’s international Internet connectivity was shut down. “In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.” Akamai Technologies Inc. has also confirmed the complete outage in Syria.

Activists in Syria reached Thursday by satellite telephone confirmed the unprecedented blackout, which comes during intense fighting in the capital, Damascus, reports the Al Arabiya News. “Syria has partially cut Internet connections during the 20-month uprising against President Bashar Assad but a nationwide shutdown is unprecedented.”

Chart below from Google’s Transparency Report showing all Google services becoming completely inaccessible on Nov 29 as a result of the nation-wide outage.

Update from Arbor Networks: Syria Goes Dark

“The actual traffic interruption is likely to have occurred between 1000 and 1100 today, the graphs show traffic interruption an hour later than this due to the variable, hourly reporting from ATLAS participants to our servers.”

Update (20:30 UTC) from Renesys:

Ten hours later, still no signs of life from the affected prefixes. “Looking back over the last week, you can see that the routing of the Syrian Internet has actually been pretty stable until today’s wholesale shutdown.”

With regards to the submarine connectivity into Syria, Renesys reports: “Here’s a map showing the three principal routes (see map). There’s also terrestrial connectivity into Turkey to the north, but those paths have not been reliable in recent months.”