As the violence continued in Libya this week, the government is apparently taking a page from Egypt in shutting down the Internet.
Internet monitoring firm Renesys said in a blog post Friday that while its routing table showed nothing unusual ("all Libyan routes up and stable"), its traceroutes tell a different story. "All of the Libyan-hosted government websites we tested (i.e., the ones that are actually hosted in Libya, and not elsewhere) were unreachable," the firm wrote.
Google's Transparency Report shows a similar drop in activity mid-day on March 3.
"The YouTube plot [on the Transparency Report] is interesting, suggesting that Google's YouTube traffic from Libya has grown steadily all week," Renesys wrote. "Tonight, however, we suspect that someone has turned off the tap on the Libyan Internet again, this time leaving the routes in place."
Internet access in Libya was also severed for a few hours on February 19.
It's not clear if cell phone service was also affected. Libya has one of the highest concentrations of mobile users in Africa, according to the AP, and the Libyan government owns two the region's mobile carriers.
This comes, of course, more than a month after Egyptian officials cut access to the Internet for several days in that county amidst a similar uprising. The protestors were eventually successful in securing the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.