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"Syria&amp;#039;s Internet access appears to have gone offline. Data from numerous traffic monitors shows that numbers dropped considerably on Tuesday evening (May 7) as a civil war continues to rage throughout the country.   Google&amp;#039;s Transparency Report backs up the claims, as its web traffic tumbled to zero. Other companies including Umbrella Security Labs and Akamai are reporting similar falls in traffic. &amp;quot;On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,&amp;quot; Umbrella&amp;#039;s chief technology officer Dan Hubbard wrote in a blog spot. &amp;quot;Although we can&amp;#039;t yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fibre cuts and power outages.&amp;quot; Due to the blackout, Google has reopened its &amp;#039;Speak to tweet&amp;#039; service that allows people with a phone line to leave messages that can be accessed by people outside the country via the Twitter account @speak2tweet. The service was created in 2011 as similar outages occurred during the uprising in Egypt. It is not the first time that Syria has been cut off from the internet. A previous outage in November 2012 saw the country cut off for around two days. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/news/a479478/syrias-internet-goes-offline-according-to-reports/>