The entire population of Azerbaijan was wiped off the Internet for several hours on Monday night, after a fire overwhelmed a data center operated by Delta Telecom, the main ISP in the country.

Azerbaijan fell into the abyss at around 4 pm local time (7 am New York time), BBC Russia reported. The outage affected almost everyone in the ex-Soviet republic, with only critical infrastructure relating to the nation’s banking and oil sectors escaping unscathed, a second report from the Trend news agency added.

Internet connectivity tracker Renesys Corp. analyzed the situation and said that around 78 percent of all Azeri networks were affected by the incident. The 600-odd networks that were plunged into darkness all rely on Delta Telecom’s connection to the Italian firm Telecom Italia Group.

Incidents in which entire countries are knocked offline are rare, but they do happen from time to time. The most recent event occurred in Syria in 2013, when the country was plunged into the electronic Dark Ages for three days, most likely because the government there hit a “kill switch’ during a sensitive moment in the ongoing civil war there. Similar incidents occurred in Egypt and Libya in the 2011 political uprisings in those countries, when their governments also deliberately cut access to the Internet. However, Monday’s incident in Azerbaijan is thought to be the first in which an entire country has been taken offline by accident.

Interestingly, Renesys says that Azerbaijan ranks among a number of countries facing a “significant” risk of losing Internet access due to the low number of networks keeping them online. It says that neighboring countries including Armenia, Georgia, Iran and Saudi Arabia all face a similar risk level. Meanwhile, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Turkmenistan all face an even greater risk due to having only “one or two” companies linking them to the World Wide Web.

Image via Renesys

The outage in Azerbaijan also took out one of the country’s three main mobile carriers. Azercell went offline because it relies on the Delta Telecom connection, but Azerfon and Bakcell were unaffected because they connect via another firm, AzerTelecom.

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