Internet Outages in Palestine

Cyber attacks affect BitTorrent usage in Palestine.

Several news sources (CNN, BBC) have reported that on November 1st, Palestine's networks were the target or cyber attacks. Here we examine how BitTorrent users were affected by these attacks and subsequent network outages. The graph below shows the number of BitTorrent users seen online per hour. We see a sharp drop of about 75% in the number of connected users in Palestine for a few hours, occurring between 1 am and 4 am (UTC) on November 1st. The drop begins around the same time the renesys blog reports a drop in reachable networks in Palestine.

Time (UTC)
# of Peers seen
Number of peers seen in Palestine between October 29th and November 3rd. The shaded region represents the day of the cyber attack. The dip in users on November 1st occurs at approximately the same time as what was reported on the renesys blog.