Last week, the entire country of Syria experienced an Internet blackout. The country’s repressive regime claimed that a terrorist attack had taken out the physical cables that connect it to the rest of the world, but Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of web security firm Cloudflare, says that claim is unfounded.
Syria, she explains, has four physical cables connecting the country to the rest of the net, and the outage happened within a span of only two minutes. Cutting all of the cables “would have to be a very orchestrated sort of event.”
More likely, she says, was that the government simply programmed the servers in charge of routing traffic to stop transmitting data in and out of the country. Syria was brought back online after roughly two days. Watch the full explanation in the video above.
CloudFlare is a service that does one thing: make websites better. With a single change to DNS, sites are instantly protected from a wide range of online threats, see an increase in page load speeds, and have their content dynamically optimized across the Internet. CloudFlare’s core service is free.
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