Darkness Again in Venezuela

Sadly, here we are again.

Back in March, our team at the Monash University IP Observatory, started providing near real-time observations of Venezuela’s IP (internet protocol addressing) space. With rising tensions, we were concerned that the incumbent regime may be tempted to tamper with the nation’s internet infrastructure, as has been documented time and again for their blocking of various websites at certain, strategic times.

What we didn’t know then was that we would be one of several international organisations who would bear witness to the tragic, nation-wide electricity crisis that engulfed the country from around 5pm, 7 March 2019, and rumbled on for the rest of the month and into April.

Now, as this week draws to a close, we are once again sending observations to our friends in Venezuela and abroad, providing granular observations on internet activity across the country to help give some light amidst the darkness.

With the regime once again making various claims of the cause for this week’s outage, following the rule book from last time, we seek here to provide citizens, scientists, engineers, and community leaders with our observations in space and time of the outage and recovery for their expert review and analysis.

In this post we provide:

A dynamic visualization created from millions of observations made by our global measurement platform, showing, at state level, and hourly granularity, the moment the outage occurred and then the differential recovery patterns across the country;

created from millions of observations made by our global measurement platform, showing, at state level, and hourly granularity, the moment the outage occurred and then the differential recovery patterns across the country; A tabulation of the impact period for each state, in hours, providing an externally established, empirical baseline for comparison; and

of the impact period for each state, in hours, providing an externally established, empirical baseline for comparison; and An open-sourced data-set of our connectivity measure (explained below) across all 13 states depicted in our dynamic visualization at hourly granularity.

The Dynamic Pattern of Failure & Recovery

The GIF below is a visualization of our data from 0am, 22 July 2019, approximately 16 hours prior to the outage.

Each location is the centroid of each of 13 states across Venezuela we observed through this period. The colour and diameter of each disc represents the degree of internet ‘connectivity’ (explained in more detail below) we observed from millions of remote measurements. The legend at right gives the interpretation of the colours in connectivity index terms.

In addition, the wonderful Kepler.gl framework we used provides the average and variance of the connectivity measure as a time-series line plot at the bottom of the figure, with the time scrubber showing the position, in local time, of the visualisation as it proceeds.

Immediately obvious is that the state of Bolívar was largely unaffected by the outage event. Venezuela’s power largely comes from the Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant (Guri Dam) in this state, and so one could draw the conclusion that the plant was not at fault, nor were the local connectors. However, the adjacent state, Monagas, suffered immediately, and was one of the more impacted states (see table below), suggesting that the transmission problem was felt almost immediately beyond the state of Bolívar itself.

In addition, in the recovery phase, it is easy to pick out the spatially related, lagging states of Táchira and Barinas.

Finally, we note that (although text is overlapping), aside from Bolívar, it would seem that Miranda state, just to the East of the Distrito Capital, was the least impacted by the outage, despite neighbouring states suffering.