Arabian nights: measuring the arab internet during the 2011 events

Abstract

The major turmoils in the world since the beginning of 2011 were largely driven by social networks and are often referred to as the Arab Spring. One of the methods used by rulers to mitigate the unrest is shutting down the Internet in their country. In this article we describe active measurements conducted during 2011 of several countries, and analyze the changes in the network. These events provide a unique opportunity to measure features of the network that are otherwise hard to track, such as static or default BGP routes.