Regional Differences in Recovery from Venezuela’s Electricity Outage

Venezuela’s national electricity grid is on the way to recover from the outages in the previous days, but there are large regional differences in recovery speed.

In the afternoon and early evening of March 7th, Venezuela’s national electricity grid experienced a nationwide outage.

The IP Observatory has been monitoring Venezuela’s Internet since early February and has provided real-time insights of the power outages that hit the nation.

Figure 1 shows the development of the Venezuela’s Internet connectivity over the recent days. The the outages reached a low on early March 8th, with a nationwide connectivity rate of only 5.6%. After a short period of recovery, a second outage hit the country, dropping the connectivity rate again to 6.6% on March 9th.

Since then, the country’s Internet has been on a slow, but steady path of recovery, reaching 72.5% internet connectivity on March 12th.

Figure 1. Venezuela’s Nationwide Internet Connectivity.

Regional Disparities in Venezuela’s Internet Recovery

The IP-Observatory’s monitoring technology, allows us to extract information about the local recovery patterns of 15 Venezuelan municipios. Taking a deeper dive into the data, reveals large regional differences in the speed of recovery of Venezuela’s Internet.

Figure 2 shows the Internet connectivity for 15 municipios, ordered from lowest to highest recovery level, the long-run average serving as index of 100. Range: 46.9 to 87.7%

Figure 2. Internet Connectivity at the Municipio Level

Three municipios, Urdaneta, Girardot, and Libertador, seem to be lacking behind the rest of the nation (see Figure 3). In particular, Urdaneta (Miranda) shows low and falling connectivity: our last reading 26.3% (title %s are mean over last four hours).

Figure 3. Internet recovery in the three municipios with he slowest recovery rate

Check out the data dash board on the IP Observatory’s Venezuela page for real-time updates and publicly available data.