Service blocking

Instagram, Twitter and YouTube were reportedly blocked by the state-run Internet service provider, CANTV.  The block lasted for a few hours, from dawn until roughly 9:50 a.m local time. Local organizations cite that the service interruption began after videos of members of the Bolivarian National Guard declaring their opposition to the government circulated on social media.

Earlier this month, access to Wikipedia was blocked after edits made to Wikipedia pages referred to the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the President of Venezuela. The Vice-Minister of International Communication denied that the block was ordered by the government.

To measure the blocks, Venezuela Inteligente and IPYS Venezuela coordinated an OONI Probe measurement campaign, sharing OONI Run links with Venezuelans to test YouTube, Instagram and Twitter across the country. According to Venezuela Inteligente, this garnered a large public response, with about 2,100 clicks on OONI Run links since 21st January 2019.

The following graph shares OONI data, showing the blocking of YouTube, Instagram and Twitter on CANTV.

Source: Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) data: Venezuela, https://api.ooni.io/files/by_country/VE

The above graph (based on openly available OONI data) corroborates Venezuela Inteligente’s reporting, showing that access to youtube.com, twitter.com and instagram.com was temporarily blocked on 21st January 2019 for about two hours (mainly between 12pm UTC to 2pm UTC).

The affected sites were blocked with a combination of SNI filtering and HTTP blocking, as evidenced by curl measurements and OONI measurements. All anomalous OONI measurements present HTTP failures and timeout errors, consistent with SNI filtering of youtube.com, instagram.com and twitter.com. The blocking of these sites also appears to be non-deterministic, since it does not cover 100% of the traffic and we observe some successful measurements as well.

While access to these social media sites was subsequently restored, Venezuela Inteligente reported that Instagram was temporarily blocked again on Friday, 25th January 2019. OONI data, illustrated below, corroborates this report.

Source: Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) data: Venezuela, https://explorer.ooni.io/country/VE

The above graph shows that all OONI measurements testing instagram.com between 2pm UTC to 3:30pm UTC presented HTTP failures (likely due to SNI filtering), suggesting that the site was temporarily blocked by CANTV. The testing of twitter.com also presented some anomalies on 26th January 2019, but the limited volume of measurements limits our ability to confirm potential blocking. Facebook and YouTube, on the other hand, did not show any signs of network interference over the following days.

Learn more through OONI’s research report.