The Associated Press hinted at an “Israeli attack” behind the Internet outage in Yemen on Friday.

Internet connectivity was cut across war-torn Yemen on Friday, and remained down for hours, the agency said, while officials later blamed unannounced “maintenance work” for the outage, which followed attacks by Houthi rebels in the country on Both Israel and the United States.”

The outage began at dawn on Friday local time, 12 a.m. GMT, and the services of the General Telecommunications Corporation of Yemen, “Yemen Net,” which is the main Internet provider for ten million users and is controlled by the Houthi rebels, who are supported by Iran, have stopped at the present time.< /p>

NetBlocks Observatory, which monitors Internet access around the world, and Cloudflare International Internet Services Network, reported a service outage in Yemen, and did not provide a reason for this outage.

Cloudflare said: “Our data shows the impact of the problem on telecommunications services at the national level as well.”

In a statement to the official Houthi-controlled Saba news agency, the Yemeni General Telecommunications Corporation blamed the power outage on maintenance work.

The statement quoted an unnamed official as saying that “Internet service will return after maintenance work is completed.”

A previous outage occurred in January 2022 when a communications building in the coastal city of Hodeidah was bombed, and there are no reports of a similar attack currently.

The Falcon submarine cable transmits the Internet to Yemen through the port of Hodeidah along the Red Sea for TeleYemen.

There is another landing point for the Falcon cable in the port of Al-Ghaydah in the far east of Yemen, but the majority of Yemen's population lives in the west of the country on the Red Sea coast.

This interruption comes after a series of attacks launched by the Houthis with drones targeting Israel amid a campaign of air strikes and a ground attack targeting the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.

This included a raid that was claimed, on Thursday, to have targeted the Israeli coastal city of Eilat.

At the same time, the Houthis shot down a US MQ-9 Repair drone this week with a surface-to-air missile, part of a series of large-scale attacks in the Middle East, raising fears about the outbreak of a regional war.

(Associated Press)