The NetBlocks internet observatory has detected major internet disruptions in Venezuela affecting YouTube, Google Search, servers for the Android mobile platform and other services as of 14:00 UTC 23 January 2019. Social media services are notably disrupted, with Facebook, Instagram intermittently cut off and the disruptions have increasingly affected other online properties.

The restrictions are observed on state telecommunications provider CANTV from Wednesday morning, based on a new set of 20,000 network measurements in a 24 hour cycle, following similar incidents affecting online services on the 21st January, when popular social media sites were disrupted, and on the 12th of January, when Wikipedia was disrupted. Technical investigations have indicated targeted filtering.

The cause of the latest outages remain unclear but are consistent with previous internet restrictions in the country. The outages have been widely reported by users and the incidents come as Venezuelans are out on the streets protesting.

Previously:

Methodology

Internet performance and service reachability are determined via NetBlocks web probe privacy-preserving analytics. Each measurement consists of latency round trip time, outage type and autonomous system number aggregated in real-time to assess service availability and latency in a given country. Network providers and locations enumerated as vantage point pairs. The root cause of a service outage may be additionally corroborated by means of traffic analysis and manual testing as detailed in the report.

NetBlocks is a civil society group working at the intersection of digital rights, cyber-security and internet governance. Independent and non-partisan, NetBlocks strives for an open and inclusive digital future for all.