Internet outages registered as Hurricane Dorian reaches U.S. East Coast

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Real-time network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory show widening connectivity outages caused by Hurricane Dorian as the Category 3 storm approaches the U.S. East Coast.

Disruptions have been registered across Charleston, Goose Creek and Summerville in coastal South Carolina as of 10:30 a.m. UTC (6:30 a.m. local time) Thursday 5 September 2019 with residents reporting flooding and power outages.

At Myrtle Beach, South Carolina,  outages were detected at 10:40 a.m. UTC (6:40 a.m. local time) as videos emerged on local news showing an apparent tornado touch down (below):

North Carolina is also reporting outages while Virginia is braced for impact. Despite the storm’s abating force, winds remain strong and surges are causing flooding in low lying areas.

Through recent days network observations have been used to assess the technical impact and geographic extent of Hurricane Dorian since the storm impacted the Bahamas on Sunday, revealing extensive, lasting damage to infrastructure while Dorian battered the Abacos and Grand Bahama. The Bahmian health minister reported several casualties while areas in the direct path of the storm have been rendered uninhabitable.

In 2018, NetBlocks reported on the network impact of Hurricane Florence as it tore through North Carolina and in 2017 the mapping system was deployed to map Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

 

Methodology

NetBlocks diffscans, which map the IP address space of a country in real time, show internet connectivity levels and corresponding outages. Purposeful internet outages may have a distinct network pattern used by NetBlocks to determine and attribute the root cause of an outage, a process known as attribution which follows detection and classification stages.

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