Considering Syria is saying cables were cut even though Cloudfare pointed out 4 cables would have had to been cut simultaneously with a couple being under sea it's seriously doubtful this is what happened. The only plausible explanation is that the traffic was stopped and given Syria's reputation for trying to stem free speech and the flow of information about what is really going on kind of makes sense.

The blog post also makes mention of traffic being disrupted a couple of times on varying scales before this major outage occurred which kind of signals that they were testing bringing the whole Internet down beforehand.