The internet in Syria has been shut off nationwide, say two US based web-monitoring companies. During the 20 months of civil uprising, Syria has gone through partial internet disruption, but a 100 per cent blackout is unprecedented.

­US-based network security firm Renesys registered Syria disappearing from the internet at 12:26pm local time (10:26 GMT).

“All 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the internet,” reads Renesys’ blogpost.

The same was confirmed by Akamai Technologies Inc, another US-based company that distributes content on the internet.

Syrian state TV denied the blackout was nationwide. It said the outage was cause by a technical failure, only affected some provinces and that technicians were trying to fix the problem. The Syrian Information Ministry blamed "terrorists" for the outage, as reported by the broadcaster.