Syria: internet services shut down as protesters fill streets for "Children's Friday"

Protests in solidarity with Syria have been taking place throughout the world this week. In Beirut, Syrian children carry pictures of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib and hold candles during a protest in front of the United Nations building in Lebanon, June 1, 2011.The Syrian boy, who activists say was tortured and killed by security forces, has emerged as a powerful symbol in protests against the rule of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad which have been met with a bloody crackdown. (REUTERS/ Jamal Saidi)

Some 50,000 protesters filled the streets in Syria today, calling for a "Children's Friday" to commemorate the deaths of children killed in anti-government protests in recent weeks, and to demand the "immediate resignation" of President Bashar al-Assad. The case sparking greatest outrage is that of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old boy whose mutilated body was returned to his family weeks after being separated from his parents at a protest. He is presumed to have been tortured, castrated, and killed by Syrian government thugs.

From The Washington Post:

A government-sponsored Web site has confirmed that the Internet has been disconnected across the country: “The Syrian government has cut off Internet service (3G, DSL, Dial-up) all across Syria, including in government institutions.”

A Syrian blogger in Damascus tweeted about the Internet shutdown, which she said was happening for the first time.

A Google Traffic transparency report shows a huge drop in traffic today.

Renesys reports that beginning at 6:35am local time in Syria, about two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet.

Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table. This image shows the current state (green: reachable, red: unreachable) of each network prefix in the Middle East this morning, visualized as a packed Hilbert-curve representation. The size of the colored area is proportional to each country's Internet presence, so you can see that Syria's Internet (red block near the top center) is a little smaller than that of Kuwait.

Al Jazeera is reporting that while filtered or degraded service quality has happened in Syria before, this is the first known total shutdown of the internet there. A member of an activist group calling itself the Syrian Revolution Coordinators Union (SRCU) told Al Jazeera,

"Four times the protesters dispersed when they opened fire, but then reassembled in another part of town," he said. The deployment of army and secret police in the city was the largest since the uprising began, he said, and internet has been completely cut, making it impossible to upload videos of the protests.