“Syria has largely disappeared from the internet.”

So said services such as Google and Umbrella Security Labs (a component of OpenDNS Inc.), which both documented a “significant drop in the traffic from Syria” around 3 p.m. EDT on Tuesday.  As of 3pm Wednesday, some activists reported connectivity is beginning to be restored.

“Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world. It’s unclear whether Internet communication within Syria is still available,” writes Dan Hubbard, chief technology officer at OpenDNS. 

Umbrella Security Labs global internet servers “no longer have a way to reach the Nameservers for .SY that reside in Syria.”

Syria is connected to the global internet by four cables, three undersea and one over land thru Turkey.  If the sudden shutdown in connectivity could be blamed on sabotage of the cables, as the Syrian Government falsely claimed in November when the country was shut off for 48-hours, all four cables would need to have been severed simultaneously.

“This is the same sort of outage, and it appears to have been accomplished in the same ways, as the outage from several months ago,” says Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer of the Cloudflare Internet Company.

While the precise way in which the country was taken off the grid this time is not yet entirely clear, in a post entitled, “How Syria Turned Off the Internet,” Prince suggests that Syria Telecom, which is the sole provider of internet connectivity in the country, accomplished the feat by reconfiguring the routers that control the county’s data traffic.

Along with what appears to be a  deliberate attempt by the Syrian government to shutdown the internet and further isolate the Syrian people, the press in Syria has also been directly target by the Assad regime, and pro-government forces throughout the conflict.

“Journalists are deliberately being targeted for kidnapping, arrest and torture in Syria,” explains an Amnesty International report. “Syria has become the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.”

According to the U.N., more than 70,000 people have been murdered in the Syrian civil war over the past two years. The chaos, violence and unrest have spilled into neighboring countries across the region such as Lebanon and Iraq. During the conflict, one million refugees have poured into Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon.