VP and General Manager Earl Zmijewsk wrote us today from Renesys, the Internet intelligence company, to let us know that, after a long, stable summer of nothing much to report, Libya’s Internet has now started to fail, probably as a result of infrastructure degradation due to war and neglect.
“Much of the country’s Internet routing has started to show evidence of sporadic failures this week, which have gone unreported in the media,” James Cowie remarked on the Renesys blog.
Cowrie goes on to explain:
“The following plot shows the number of Libyan networks (blocks of Libyan IP addresses) that appear in the global routing table. There are typically 16 of these, all routed by Libyan Telecom and Technology (LTT) via Telecom Italia. This week they have suffered some impairment, in groups of 6 or 10, in episodes that typically last no more than a few hours.
“There didn’t seem to be any pattern to these outages, which took place at all times of the day and night. It seems to suggest power outages, rather than permanent facilities damage, or deliberate action by the government (for suppressing communications, say).”
The bulk of traffic generated in Libya is from the capital city of Tripoli. The ISPs that have been going down do not include that which covers Tripoli. This, Renesys suggests, may be why it has gone largely undetected in the media.
At the beginning of the protests that subsequently became the Libyan civil war, the government of the country emulated Egypt, among others, and shut off the Internet completely in that country. They later brought it back online, at least for governmental use.
