Renesys Chronicles Today’s Internet Blackout in the Sudan (Now Restored)

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Renesys Chronicles Today’s Internet Blackout in the Sudan (Now Restored)

	By Dan York Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and Senior Advisor at Internet Society
	September 26, 2013 Views: 8,614 Add Comment

The team over at Renesys has once again provided a great analysis of an Internet outage in a country, this time in Sudan. In the article simply titled “Internet Blackout in Sudan”, Doug Madory writes:

A few hours ago, we observed a total Internet blackout in Sudan and, as we publish this blog, the Internet remains largely unavailable. By count of impacted networks, it is the largest national blackout since Egypt disconnected itself in January 2011. The massive outage came as the government began a violent crackdown on protests triggered by the government’s decision to end fuel subsidies.

A Renesys tweet has now indicated that Internet connectivity has been restored in the Sudan after about 24 hours, and includes this image dramatically showing the outage:

The article goes on to document the dropoff in Internet traffic and connectivity that Renesys measured and concludes with this note:

Our plots of connectivity clearly show that Sudatel and Zain experienced identical outage timelines, while Canar’s total blackout followed a somewhat different schedule. This difference in timing implies that this event was not caused by a single catastrophic technical failure, but strongly suggests a coordinated action to remove Sudan from the Internet.

It’s great that Internet connectivity has been restored to Sudan (and I’ve seen that confirmed from other sources) and it’s great that people like the team at Renesys are out there monitoring—and documenting—events like this!

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By Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and Senior Advisor at Internet Society — Dan is a Senior Advisor at the Internet Society but opinions posted on CircleID are his own. View more of Dan’s writing and audio here.
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