The Internet shutdown was criticized on Saturday by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who issued a statement saying the U.S. was deeply concerned by reports that Internet service was unavailable across much of Syria, and that some mobile communication networks were offline as well. "We condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people's exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association," Clinton said in the statement.

Seven of the 40 networks that were earlier unreachable returned around 19:00 UTC (22:00 local time Friday night in Damascus). The development was reported by Renesys, a firm that studies Internet traffic flows, via on Saturday. The rest came back shortly after 04:00 UTC (07:00 local time Saturday morning), it said.

Renesys reported on Friday that starting at 3:35 UTC (6:35 am local time) on that day, approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, it said.

The network prefixes that remained reachable include those belonging to the Syrian government, although many government websites were slow to respond or down, Renesys said.

The networks that were not reachable included the prefixes reserved for SyriaTel's 3G mobile data networks, and smaller downstream Internet service providers, Renesys said.