Photo of Sudan President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir via Wikimedia
We confirm #Sudan has cut itself off from global Internet 45min ago (12:47UTC) amid riots in Khartoum pic.twitter.com/dAkhxssCsu
— Renesys Corporation (@renesys) September 25, 2013
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Chances are, the Sudanese government is behind the blackout. Sudan's online disappearing act came after three days of protests that started over rising fuel prices intensified and morphed into a call to oust President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, reported Al Arabiya today. Six people were killed in the demonstrations, which were organized with the help of social media, and today police started using tear gas on the crowd.And according to Renesys, the nature of the outage implies that it was at the state's behest. Four ISPs were cut off at the same time, which isn't likely to happen due to just a technical glitch. "It's either a government-directed thing or some very catastrophic technological failure that just happens to coincide with violent riots happening in the city," Renesys senior analyst Doug Madory told the Associated Press. If the government did decide to switch off the Internet, it would be the biggest state-mandated blackout since Egypt in 2011.Increasingly, authoritarian regimes facing public dissent are turning to the draconian measure as if it's as simple as changing the TV channel when you don't like what's playing. Is this how it's going to be now? First try to break up the crowd, then break out the tear gas, then shut the Internet off?Sudan disappeared from the Internet at 12:47 UTC Today (Sept 25). First outages in Sudan started at 10:24 UTC pic.twitter.com/QjKuZWamtF
— BGPmon.net (@bgpmon) September 25, 2013
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