The outage began at 5:00am in Iraq and lasted until 8:00am, based on data from Dyn Research. According to the Egypt-based Arabic news service El Hadas, the outage corresponded to "the start of the sixth ministerial preparatory exams"—the national tests for entry into junior high school. In Iraq, education is only required for all students up to the sixth-grade level; those who fail to score well enough on exams at the end of the sixth year generally don't continue their education.
With that kind of high-pressure testing, the motivation for cheating is high as well—so high that the government decided to shut down Internet access to prevent parents or others from remotely assisting students during the exams. It's not clear whether the brief outage today (which lasted about an hour, starting at 5:00am again) was also connected to testing.
