Internet access in Libya was severed for several hours this weekend, as protestors took to the streets to demand an end to the 40-year reign of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
On Friday night, Internet monitoring firm Renesys said in a blog post that "Libya is off the Internet."
The same night, Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, tweeted that "queries from Libya to Google have dropped enormously." He posted a link toGoogle's Transparency Report, which allows users to drill down and see whether Google services are blocked in certain countries.
By Saturday morning, Renesys said that Internet access in Libya had been restored. "At the moment, spot checks of Libyan domains and traceroutes into affected networks indicate that connectivity has been restored, and Libya is back on the Internet," the company wrote.
Arbor Networks also examined the issue, and found that Internet access was also affected in Bahrain, another country in which anti-government protestors have taken to the streets.
"Overall, our data shows pronounced changes in Internet traffic levels in two Middle East countries last week: Bahrain and Libya. While network failures and other exogenous events may play a role in decreased traffic volumes, we observe the changes in Bahrain and Libya are temporally coincident with the onset of recent protests," Arbor Networks wrote in a Sunday blog post. "Several Bahrain telecommunication companies blamed the slowdown on 'overloaded circuits' and extremely high usage."
Arbor said that many countries in the region "maintain some level of permanent Internet limits, including blocks on dissident web sites, social media and adult content." In examining traffic in the region over the past few days, Arbor said the data "represent possible traffic manipulation beyond normal filtering practices."
This comes, of course, about a month after Egyptian officials cut access to the Internet for several days in that county amidst a similar uprising. The protestors were eventually successful in securing the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.
In Libya, the protests have turned deadly. Human Rights Watch reports that the death toll is now at 233, with 60 killed in the Libyan city of Benghazi yesterday alone. The New York Times reportedMonday that Qaddafi's son appeared on Libyan TV to say that the country would fall into civil war if they overthrew his father. "Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt," he said several times.
Meanwhile, bit.ly CEO John Borthwick wrote on Quora that Libya blocking the Internet should not affect any .ly domain.
"For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative *all* have to be offline, or responding with empty responses," he wrote. "Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya."
Engineer Kim Davies, however, responded that "it is a sense of false confidence to state that country-code domains are impervious to these kinds of government-mandated Internet shutdowns. If a country like Libya decides to shut down the Internet affecting the registry operations of .LY, while it is unlikely to have an immediate effect unless they explicitly empty the registry data, it can have a devastating effect in short order."