Update: At 14:45 UTC on May 8, 20 hours after practically taking the country off the Internet, Syria's data connections to the outside world were restored, according to data from Arbor Networks.

At about 2:45 Eastern time (18:45 UTC) on May 7 , Internet traffic in and out of Syria came to a sudden stop, as routers stopped propagating routes to the country's block of Internet Protocol addresses. The suddenness and completeness of the disconnection is indicative of another government-directed shutdown—the first since a two-day outage last November.

All but three entries in Border Gateway Protocol routing tables "were definitely just dropped," said Dan Hubbard, CTO of Umbrella Security Labs, the research branch of security firm OpenDNS in a phone interview with Ars Technica. "There was no degradation or packet loss beforehand. It was either a government action or a full cable cut (of Syria's three outbound connections)."

The last time Syria disappeared from the Internet was on November 29, 2012. But unlike the last outage, today's wasn't preceded by smaller interruptions in network traffic. Since December 1, when Syria's Internet was restored from the first shutdown, "there hasn't been anything notable going on with [Syria's] traffic," Hubbard said.

While there are still three routes being broadcast for Syrian IP addresses, the same was true of the last outage—and many of those addresses were actually being hosted outside of Syria over Indian telecom provider Tata's networks. Domain name resolution for all domains in the .sy top-level domain has been cut off. Google has also reported the Syrian outage as a service disruption for all its products.

In an email to Ars, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said that it "looks like it happened right at 20:00 UTC (last few requests coming through at 20:01, then basically dead)." Cloudflare has posted a video of the BGP routes being dropped in realtime, as captured by its network operations center.

Activist Internet provider Telecomix has posted dial-up Internet access numbers for Syrians trying to bypass the outage.