As dawn broke in Libya on the morning of Sunday 21, August, it appeared that the battle for control of Tripoli was underway. Throughout the night, a steady stream of tweets and retweets emerged from Libyan sources, painting a confusing, often contradictory picture of the evolving situation....

Starting at 3:35 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) today (6:35am local time), Renesys observed that approximately 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 Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.

Libya's nationwide Internet blackout is entering its second full day. From a technical standpoint, it's clear that this is a very different strategy than the one used by Egypt in the last days of the Mubarak regime. The ultimate outcome is probably going to be the same. Let's take...

For years, the internet community has monitored the evolution of online communication restrictions imposed by governments such as Iran and China. On 28 January, Egypt raised the bar on censorship with its "kill-switch" strategy, eliminating internet connectivity and suppressing data communications nationwide for five days.

Against such...

Renesys can confirm that Egyptian Internet providers returned to the Internet at 09:29:31 UTC (11:29am Cairo time). Websites such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt, MCDR, and the US Embassy in Cairo, are once again reachable.

Even before their communications blackout, Egypt really was a small part of the Internet in absolute terms, just a few thousand routable networks out of nearly 400,000 making up the global IPv4 address space.

To illustrate the point, we put together these images, which use a Hilbert curve...