In my feels after stumbling upon these videos from Cloudfare visualizing the 2012 & 2013 internet blackouts in Syria during the escalation of their civil war. They show the entire country effectively disappearing from the Internet.

I was listening to Urchin by Arca at the time and it felt fitting.

growing @radworks 🌱 &   @optimism 🔴

Interestingly enough, Edward Snowden claims that the 2012 blackout was actually caused by the NSA during a botched hack in which agents attempted to remotely install an exploit that would enable access to all email and Internet traffic from the country. Instead they bricked the router, rendering it entirely inoperable.