Syria goes black on Internet, phone service

Syria’s Internet service on Wednesday was almost completely blacked out — and it’s highly unlikely to be an accident, global web monitors say.

Syria hasn’t explained the outage, but experts at Renesys, a global Internet monitoring company, say the nation is very easy to isolate from the Web, NBC reported. Syria only has two “frontier” Internet service providers in the entire nation, and those can be easily disconnected, Renesys said.

And it would only take a second, experts said. Either government or rebel fighters could be to blame. The Associated Press reported that landline and mobile phone service were cut off, too.

The news comes as violence continues to escalate in the war-torn nation, and accusations come from both sides about the use of chemical weapons. Rebel fighters said on Wednesday that President Bashar Assad’s regime has pushed into a town just south of Damascus, in a strategic location with a highway to the Jordan border, AP reported.

Meanwhile, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that rebel fighters just shot a fighter jet down that had been targeting opposition fighters near the border with Turkey, AP said.