The internet in Syria has been taken down by an as-yet unidentified source, leaving 20 million citizens offline.
Internet intelligence firm Renesys was the first to report the issues after it discovered 77 network outages at 10:26am UK time, which accounted for 92% of the networks routed through the country.
Renesys, which runs a real-time global sensor grid to monitor and analyse internet routing data, later reported the whole internet was down as none of 84 blocks of IP addresses allocated to Syria were contactable.
''In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the internet,''wrote Jim Cowie, co-founder and CTO of Renesys, on the company's blog.
''We are investigating the dynamics of the outage and will post updates as they become available.''
Computer Weekly tried to contact the Syrian Embassy to find out the reasons for the outage but was unable to find a spokesman.
Emirates airline also confirmed to Computer Weekly that all flights out of the country have been suspended with immediate effect due to ''political unrest,'' although no link between the two has been confirmed.
The UK removed its embassy from Syria last year because of security and still advises UK citizens not to travel to the country under any circumstances.
The Foreign Office was also unable to comment on the current situation.
