Internet instability hits Iran

SOME OF THE PRESS have claimed that Iran's government has been censoring the country's Internet and clamping down on social notworking sites like Facebook in the wake of the weekend's election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Talk has been that Ahmadinejad has ordered the shut down of all sites that were being used by opposition groups to organise action against his regime.

True there have been accusations of election fraud and people have been taking to the streets in Iran, however the country's Internet slowdowns might have little to do with the government.

According to Renesys something did happen in the Iranian telecom space, and the timing was aligned with the close of voting and the emerging controversy.

However the problem might have been merely technical. Iran's Internet is unstable at the best of times because it runs though a single transit point. Route instability started to spike on Saturday and walloped the majority of Iran's Internet presence.

The whole lot of Iran's Internet connections crashed on Saturday afternoon but were soon restored. However, network instability continued through Sunday.

One cause of the instability could have been huge amounts of traffic trying to access Iranian websites as the outside world tried to find out what was going on. It was also possible that there were cyber protests going on inside and outside the country. The situation is still evolving.

The country's network traffic profile seems to suggest that there might be something wrong with Iran's connection to the submarine cables running east and west. µ