How Did the Internet Respond in Venezuela on 3 January?
05/02/2026
By: Elisa Peirano, Norberto Faria, Alejandro Acosta
Introduction
This blog post is written entirely from a technical perspective. It will only examine the impact on the Internet in the country.
Context
Last Saturday, 3 January, at approximately 1:50 am local time (5:50 UTC), an attack occurred in Venezuela that affected several locations, primarily military areas. The attack lasted less than two hours; however, power outages persisted in some regions. One of the sites targeted by the attack was “Cerro El Volcán,” where dozens of telecommunications companies operate.
It should be noted that the attack focused on the north-central part of the country, where the majority of the population resides.
About RIPE ATLAS
What is RIPE Atlas? RIPE Atlas is a global Internet measurement platform that relies on the Internet community to host probes on their networks and thus contribute to Internet visibility. The platform allows users to monitor and troubleshoot their own networks, as well as to measure various aspects of Internet performance. RIPE Atlas data is publicly available, and measurements can be customized to meet the needs of probe hosts.
On 3 January, 42 RIPE Atlas probes were connected in Venezuela. Only one probe was affected by the attack, experiencing a brief disconnection, as shown in the image below:
About NAP VE
NAP VE is Venezuela’s first Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a neutral and open platform that allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs), networks, and content providers to exchange data locally. By keeping traffic within the country, NAP VE improves the speed and efficiency of national connectivity, reducing latency and costs, and strengthening the Venezuelan digital ecosystem.
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NAP VE BGP Collector
- 3 January at 00:00
- 77 unique AS’s
- 790 unique IPv4
- 117 unique IPv6
- 3 January at 06:00
- 77 unique AS’s
- 789 unique IPv4
- 116 unique IPv6
Resource Visibility
The following graph was generated using data from the RIPE NCC API (https://stat.ripe.net/docs/02.data-api/country-resource-stats.html), which returns statistics on Internet resources for a country (ASN, IPv4, and IPv6). For this analysis, the RIPE NCC API was queried for data related to Venezuela covering the period from 1 January to 3 January (23:55 UTC), with a specific focus on resource visibility.
Minimal impact was observed on the resources seen in the global routing tables, which can be summarized as a decrease across all resources. Visibility reached its lowest point on 3 January at 3:20 pm, when, among others, only 2,357 Venezuelan IPv4 prefixes were visible in the DFZ.
| 1st January | 3 January at 3:20 pm | 6 January | |||
| IPv4 Prefixes | 2388 | 2354 (-1.47%) | 2,387 | ||
| IPv6 prefixes | 501 | 496 (-1%) | 500 | ||
| ASN | 167 | 161 (-3.6,%) | 165 | ||
Traffic Analysis at NAP VE IXP (Caracas, Maracaibo, and Valencia)
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of LACNIC.