Syria lost its international Internet connectivity Thursday, starting around 12:30pm Damascus time, according to Renesys, a company that monitors global Internet operations. Mobile and land telephone lines were down in some areas as well, according to news reports.

“In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet,” Jim Cowie, Renesys CTO and co-founder, wrote in the company’s blog.

All customer networks of the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (the country’s primary autonomous system) were unreachable Thursday, Cowie wrote.

Five Syrian networks that hosted Syrian content were connected to the Internet and reachable by traceroutes. While these networks used Syrian-registered IP space, Renesys CTO said they were potentially outside of Syria “and perhaps not subject to whatever killswitch was thrown today within Syria.”

Akamai, a global content delivery network operator and service provider, confirmed that there was a country wide Internet blackout in Syria via its StateOfTheInternet Twitter feed. “Akamai traffic data supports @renesys observation … that Syria is effectively off the Internet,” the company’s representatives wrote in a tweet.

Activists say the Syrian government has shut the Internet down intentionally, according to the Associated Press. Syria’s minister of information, in a statement broadcast by a state-run TV station, said terrorists had targeted Internet lines, which caused some areas of the country to loose Internet connectivity, according to a Reuters report.

The government’s statements contradict Renesys’ and Akamai’s observations that the entire country has been offline.

Syria has been amidst a protracted civil war since March 2011. It started with nationwide protests and eventually grew into an armed rebellion by protesters who demanded that the country’s president Bashar al-Assad steps down.

The government has been using its military to quell the uprising. Rebels have been using the Internet as a means to communicate with each other and to inform the outside world about what has been happening in the country.