Tropical Storm Ana knocks out power in Malawi

Metrics from NetBlocks indicate a major power outage in Malawi from the afternoon of 24 January 2022. The disruptions began as Tropical Storm Ana made landfall on Monday, with rainfall inundating the south of the country.

Real time network data show severe ongoing impact to telecommunications infrastructure leaving national connectivity at 72% of ordinary levels as of Wednesday morning. The outages resulting from the storm are likely to hinder search and rescue efforts.

Tropical Storm Ana has left dozens dead with the number of casualties unknown. It also impacted neighbouring Mozambique and Madagascar, although national infrastructure has not been as significantly affected in those countries.

Further reading:


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.

