South Lebanon Internet Outages
On Sep 28 Israel launched hundreds of missiles into South Lebanon. Three days later on 1 October 2024, Israel invaded South Lebanon in an escalation of the ongoing Israel–Hezbollah conflict that has led to thousands without Internet access.
Media reports say local communities in Southern Lebanon have had difficulty accessing the Internet due to Israeli airstrikes hitting Internet infrastructure, the inability to supply Internet towers with diesel and increased pressure on generators.
According to a recent report from SMEX, the situation means expensive cellular data is the only option for locals to stay connected and receive vital life-saving information during the conflict.
IODA, the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project led by Internet measurement researchers at Georgia Tech’s Internet Intelligence Lab, shows data on Internet outages across Southern Lebanon during October 2024. The IODA project’s data measures the connectivity of Internet infrastructure; these methods do not always capture cellular network connectivity.
During the invasion, internet connectivity has been disrupted with IODA data showing the following:
The graph above shows Internet connectivity signals for South Lebanon over time (UTC). The green line represents Routing Announcements or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and is usually a very stable signal at 100%. Active Probing is represented by the blue line and indicates the percentage of networks that are responsive/online.
Since the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, IODA data reveals Internet connectivity has been disrupted with IODA’s dashboard showing a sizeable drop in two IODA signals on three particular dates in October 2024. As the graph shows, ~50% of the network in South Lebanon are responsive to IODA, when normally this number would be ~95%. Routing Announcements, which are typically at 100% have fallen to as low as 60% and are now at 70% as of Friday, November 8th.
For media covering this story, please contact Amanda Meng, Zachary Bischof, or Alberto Dainotti via ioda-info@cc.gatech.edu for comments and analysis.
About IODA
IODA monitors the Internet in near-realtime to identify Internet outages affecting countries, subnational regions, and networks. Visit IODA for more information.