Libya practically offline, bit.ly still working

As Libya descends into a vortex of protests and violent retaliations for the same – courtesy of the country’s long-lived president Muammar al-Gaddafi – the conflict has serious repercussions on the nation’s ability to access the Internet.

Al-Gaddafi seems to have learned a lesson from similar unrests in Tunisia and Egypt and – according to data collected by Arbor Networks and reported by Reuters – online traffic in and out of Libya has been completely disrupted at 7:15 p.m. EST on Friday.

The day after, the traffic resumed and was shut down again a few times, but finally went down again in the evening. There are still reports that some traffic is coming through and that the country’s citizens can occasionally access the Internet, but according to Tech2,access is based on a curfew.

Bit.ly – the popular URL shortener that is parked on a Libyan domain – has had no problems with delivering its services. “”For .ly domains to be unresolvable, the five .ly root servers that are authoritative *all* have to be offline, or responding with empty responses,” commented its CEO John Borthwick. “Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya.”