Cuba's electrical grid collapses in nationwide blackout

reuters.com

30 points·petethomas··9 comments

Doesn't appear to be a complete power failure, as Cloudflare Radar shows only a partial drop in traffic from Cuba: https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/cu?dateRange=1d

If you've got generators for towers and people use their mobile phones, I'd expect traffic to continue. 37% is a little higher than I'd expect, but I don't know the make-up of traffic.

Rolling power outages are the norm in Cuba. I would say that number is about right.

about blackouts and other problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJwe0s5N-g8

(youtuber travels and talks to people, 20min)

should work with auto-translated subtitles

"Communist Cuba's national power grid collapsed for the fourth time in less than a year on Wednesday morning causing a nationwide blackout, authorities said."

Just awful.

This reads like propaganda because they very clearly are not in a total blackout.

"There has been a total disconnection of the Electric System," the (Cuban state) Energy Ministry and National Electric Union said.

The (Cuban) grid operator said the grid collapsed at 9.14 a.m. (1314 GMT) on the Caribbean island.

???

They have been holding 50% of their internet traffic for over 8 hours. Sure seems like quite a lot of energy is being generated. Is the power generation islanded? Most definitely. But Cuba's grid is already built with the expectation for chunks of it to go down due to severe storm damage and has tons of local power generation.

Why would the Cuban government lie about this, though? Seems like they should be lying in the other direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com