The internet was restored to Kazakhstan’s largest city on Monday following a five-day outage caused by deadly riots that killed dozens and left the 1.8 million-person financial powerhouse reeling, according to an AFP journalist.

Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, had been practically totally down since Wednesday, but local and international websites were restored on Monday, which had been proclaimed a day of mourning following the greatest upheaval in the ex-Soviet republic’s autonomous history.

Kazakhstan has presented the violence in Almaty as an attack by “terrorist organizations,” and it has voiced irritation with international media coverage of the events, which began on January 2 with protests over a gasoline price rise in the country’s west.

However, the totalitarian administration has also struggled to establish its own version of events.

On Sunday evening, the information ministry reversed a message that had circulated earlier in the day on an officially maintained Telegram channel, claiming that more than 164 people had died in the violence across the nation.

According to two private websites that broke the news, the information ministry stated that the announcement was the product of a “technical error.”

The foreign ministry claimed in a statement given to the media on Monday that international media coverage had generated “the incorrect impression that the Kazakhstan government has been targeting peaceful demonstrators.” Our security personnel have been engaged in combat with hostile crowds perpetrating heinous acts of terror.”

According to AFP journalists, life in Almaty was gradually returning to normal on Monday, with public transportation visible on the city’s roadways for the first time since the violence erupted.