The routes are back in Tripoli, but the DSL service isn't, Renesys said. Local Internet service appears to be down again, the status quo ante for the last five months, it added.

DSL was blocked in Tripoli in the middle of February, though it was unblocked in some selective government buildings for some government officials during March and April, according to Shreef.

"Local servers are accessible and the .ly websites can be accessed. This has been so since February," Shreef said.

Renesys speculated that the "brief Tripoli Internet flicker" was the sign of a conflict within the local phone company itself, with someone struggling to reactivate service at the neighborhood level, only to have it switched off again at the national level. The overnight routing failure could also be just another in a sequence of probably power-related outages for Libyan Telecom and Technology's outlier networks, it added.

The IDG News Service