Measuring Venezuela’s power outage in real time

In the midst of ongoing political turmoil, Venezuela has experienced widespread power outages over the last few days. The power cuts were wide-spread and included even the country’s capital Caracas.

Source: BBC.com (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47492624)

Both the government and the opposition hve tried to shift the blame for the outages onto each other. While the incumbent government of President Nicolás Maduro has accused the opposition and the U.S. of sabotage, the opposition blames the current regime’s inefficiencies and chaos for the outages.

With political tensions rising in Venezuela since early February, the Monash University’s IP-Observatory has been observing the status of the Venezuelan internet space from multiple sources worldwide.

So far, we have made over 6 million observations of internet activity in Venezuela since 7 Feb 2019. We have focussed our attention on 17 municipios(local government regions) where our observations have the highest quality, centering on Caracas and surrounding regions.

Nation-wide power outage

Bringing our observations together to provide a national perspective, we observed first-hand the power outage that has crippled the country since the afternoon of the 7th March.

We estimate that from a baseline fluctuation in internet connectivity of between 80 to 100%, the outage knocked out around 80–85% of the normal online connectivity, with all districts

Visit the IP-Observatory’s Venezuela dashboard to get more insights and access data about disruptions to the country’s ICT infrastructure.