Blackout in Chile: what internet measurements say

27/02/2025

By Elisa Peirano, Alejandro Acosta and Carolina Badano from LACNIC

Last Tuesday the 25th, a power outage of such magnitude occurred in Santiago de Chile that it left millions of people without electricity and led the government of this country to declare a state of emergency and curfew. Although there are no official figures, the cut occurred where more than 80% of the population lives (in total Chile has 20 million inhabitants)

From the point of view of Internet measurements, we were able to visualize the situation through the RIPE Atlas probes installed in Chile.

Sources: RIPE Atlas and visualization from Observable

In the previous graph you can see the number of probes connected in Chile. On the afternoon of February 25, the fall of more than half of the probes is clearly seen due to lack of energy.

Regarding the geographical location of the probes, not only were some in the capital disconnected, but also some in other areas of the center and north, while those located to the south were not disconnected.

What is RIPE Atlas? It is an Internet measurement platform with global coverage that relies on the Internet community to connect probes to their networks and thus contribute to the visibility of the Internet. This platform allows you to monitor the network itself and do troubleshooting, as well as measure various aspects of the Internet. Atlas data is public and measurements can be customized to fit the needs of the probe host.

The probes are of 2 types: probes and anchors where the anchors are more stable and powerful in terms of measurement capacity.

The number of probes in Chile has been increasing, especially since 2022, as can be seen in the figure below:

It should be noted that of the 7 anchors installed in Chile, only 1 suffered from the blackout.

The following graph was taken using the RIPE NCC API (https://stat.ripe.net/docs/02.data-api/country-resource-stats.html) which returns specific information about the visibility of resources (ASN, IPv4, and IPv6) of a country.

To generate the graph, the RIPE NCC API was asked for the data for Chile, starting on February 25th until the 26th (12:00 UTC). Information on resource visibility was particularly extracted.

Resource visibility (from 2/25/2025 00:00 UTC to 2/26/2025 12:00 UTC)

A little impact on the resources seen in the global routing tables can be seen, which shows a good infrastructure of the Internet service. 

We spoke with Hugo Salgado, DNS Architect at Tucows Domains, and a reference in the Internet community, who told us that “The Internet – during the blackout – never had very important outages. There were people who had UPS or a generator in their homes, and connected by fiber to their supplier, always had access”. In my personal case, I had mobile Internet connectivity via cell phone normally until 3 hours after the blackout, and then it was intermittent for the rest of the time. I suspect saturation in the few antennas that were left standing,” commented Salgado.

This latest graph provided by Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik, shows the state of Internet traffic to Chile and the abrupt decrease in bandwidth consumption at the time of the outage and its evolution towards Wednesday, February 26.

The National Electrical Coordinator of Chile stated that the incident began with a failure in the high-voltage transmission line that connects the Atacama Desert with Santiago.

Although the causes continue to be investigated, a cyber-attack has been ruled out