Libya’s Internet Goes Down Again

In the midst of the ongoing strife in Libya over Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime and craziness, internet has again been cut off from protesters. According to a report by internet access monitoring firm Renesys, Libya’s servers have been down since around 4:35 PM yesterday.

Libya’s government already tried this on February 18, shortly after national protests broke out in the wake of unrest across the region and former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s decision to step down. By blocking routes into their servers, Libya had mirrored Egypt’s own decision to flip the killswitch on their internet by making themselves invisible to the net at large.

However, that attempt failed, with internet being restored after just six hours. Yesterday, the tactics changed. Instead of not broadcasting routes to the servers in the country, incoming traffic just doesn’t reach them. According to Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro:

The best analogy I can think of is that, although the figurative canal system is still in place to get traffic to the right destination, Libya simply pulled the plug and drained the water.

It’s only a matter of time before protesters in Libya and abroad break through the block or develop a workaround. Until then, those on the ground there have one more obstacle to overcome in their battles against an increasingly unpredictable leader. [New Scientist via Geekosystem]


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