Palestinians living in Gaza and those attempting to contact people in Gaza on Friday evening said that they had lost connection with them either via telephone or the internet amid reports of heavy shelling of the narrow strip.
It heightened fears that Israel was about to launch its much-delayed ground invasion of the Gaza strip.
Human rights defenders said that a "total blackout on internet and communications in Gaza".
They added that they had lost communications with paramedics trying to get to and retrieve dead and injured amidst heavy bombardment of the narrow strip by Israel.
The outage was also confirmed by Netblocks, which tracks outage of network across the world:
The toll from three weeks of intense bombing by Israel since the surprise October 7 attack by Hamas has already killed over 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with nearly 20,000 people injured. Thousands are thought to be buried under the rubble of flattened apartment blocks across Gaza.