Reports coming from several global Internet monitoring sites say that Syria went dark on Tuesday night(10:45am Tuesday Alaska time) as service to Internet and cell phones became non-existant.

It is unknown if there is service within the country, but all traffic in and out of the country has ceased.

This is not the first time that an outage has occurred nation-wide in that country. Service was cut in November. The Syrian government blamed the rebels for the outage then, but it was later determined that it was the government itself that cut communication ties with the world. That outage lasted two days.

It is believed that this is the case this time as well. Although it could be cut cables that is the culprit in this outage, it would be virtually impossible to cut all four of the cables going into the country simultaniously, and monitoring sites are saying that it doesn’t have the earmarks of that type of outage.

It has been shown in the past that the Syrian government will cut communications in advance of major operations to severly curtail communications between opposing forces. But the rebels have a work-around for Internet outages and switch to satellite communication in those instances. But, that mode of communication leaves the rebels vulnerable to tracking as the Assad government can track and pinpoint locations when rebels use that method.

More than cutting off communications between the rebels though is the possibility that communications were cut with the outside world in preparation of major military action in the country.

This most recent shutdown of the Internet comes only three days after massive airstrikes by the Israelis targetted military installations in the north of Damascus. Last November’s outage occurred as heavy fighting was reported at airports in the same area.