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Myanmar Internet turned off

  • From: Steve Gibbard
  • Date: Wed Oct 03 21:59:01 2007

There have been several news stories today about Myanmar's government turning off the country's Internet connectivity to suppress news coming out of the country (for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/world/asia/04info.html?ref=world). Doing some poking at it earlier today, here's what I found:

The .MM top level domain has disappeared.  It's served by three name
servers:
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mm.                     172800  IN      NS      NS-MM.RIPE.NET.
mm.                     172800  IN      NS      NS.NET.mm.
mm.                     172800  IN      NS      NS0.MPT.NET.mm.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
NS.NET.mm.              172800  IN      A       202.153.125.17
NS0.MPT.NET.mm.         172800  IN      A       203.81.64.20
NS-MM.RIPE.NET.         172800  IN      A       193.0.12.151

ns0.mpt.net.mm is in Myanmar, part of the network of Myanma Post & Telecommunication. It's unreachable.

ns.net.mm is in address space registered to Powerbase DataCenter Services (HK) Ltd. in Hong Kong. It's also unreachable, which makes it difficult to confirm whether its physical location matches its registered location. It may also be in Myanmar.

ns-mm.ripe.net is in Amsterdam. It's reachable, but is responding to all queries with a SERVFAIL response. Presumably, this means it hasn't been able to get updates from a master server for the .MM domain for long enough that its data has expired.

Looking at the rest of Myanmar's connectivity to the outside world, Myanma Post & Telecommunication has two IP address blocks registered to it: 203.81.64.0/19 and 203.81.160.0/20. Both of those blocks were in the global Internet routing table on September 27, but but have not been since September 28 (according to daily snapshots of route-views data). It's pretty safe to say that Myanma Post & Telecommunication has completely turned off its connection to the outside world. This is no doubt following the example set by the King of Nepal during the coup there a couple years ago.

The New York Times story says there are two ISPs in Myanmar. Myanma Post & Telecommunication is the only one with IP addresses registered to a mailing address within the country, so I'm not sure who the other one is, or what its status is.

-Steve