Internet and phone communications in Syria were gradually being restored Monday after a three-hour outage caused by damage to a fiber-optic cable, state television said.

It did not say what caused the damage to the cable, or whether the incident was related to the country's civil war.

"Internet and telephone communications are being gradually restored after the repair of the fiber-optic cable," Syria's telecommunications minister was quoted as saying by state television.

It was unclear if the outage was nationwide, but Internet and phone lines in Damascus were down for around three hours.

Communications in Syria have regularly been disrupted by damage to infrastructure as a result of fighting between rebels and regime forces.