We have been seeing buckling infrastructure and rolling blackouts throughout Venezuela for years. The sorry state of Venezuela’s networks is nothing new. But the new quarantine, and the massive surge in network traffic that comes with it, may finally break Venezuela’s internet.

In most of the rest of the world, although networks are certainly under unprecedented strain, people have generally been able to use the internet freely. Coordination between internet service providers, platforms, and application managers, along with the deregulatory approach taken by the Federal Communications Commission, have created an environment of necessary flexibility to weather the quarantine.