Internet Usage in Haiti

Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti devastated hundreds of thousands of lives and the aftershocks are felt physically and emotionally throughout the world.

The Mozilla community includes thousands of people in Haiti, and in our metrics, we can see the hole this disaster has left in our community.  The chart below shows Firefox usage in Haiti this week (it’s based on a once daily “ping” that we see from active users) and it’s broken down by hour (local time in Haiti).  This picture is not pretty and it suggests that much of the communications infrastructure within Haiti has been adversely affected.

haiti_firefox

Everyone in Haiti could use our thoughts and help, and we’d like to put out a personal plea to the Mozilla family to consider these members of our community and donate if you can.

(Thanks to Daniel Einspanjer for contributing to this post.)

9 responses

  1. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    That’s a chilling perspective.

    Thank you for sharing this.

  2. Donnie Berkholz wrote on :

    It would be quite interesting to see that day’s graph overlaid with the “expected” graph, instead of trying to visualize it myself.

  3. Lynn wrote on :

    Thoughts? How about prayers? Or is that not politically correct enough.

    You can’t have it both ways. These people need our prayers now more than ever.

  4. ugh wrote on :

    That is a terrible graph. Why didn’t you use a longer timeline?

  5. Mamma M wrote on :

    That seems like a no brainer to me…

  6. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    People show and reveal their true character the most in troubling times.
    Posting any type of negative comments to this post is pretty classless and of poor taste, and I’m sorry that I have to contribute one myself but I will in defensive of others.

    Lynn, I am a Christian, some of my best friends are atheists or agnostics. While I would certainly love for them to share what I believe and live by, I don’t condemn them for not doing so, I don’t think any less of them, I respect them as I do others, but most of all, I do not insist that my beliefs and stances on things are absolute, correct, and the only way because when it all comes down to it, they are just opinions.
    I’ll find out exactly what I was right or wrong about when I die.
    I also don’t discount “thoughts” as being any less sincere than prayers are. I image that thoughts for atheists and agnostics are the equivalent of prayers to those who believe in prayers and a higher power.

    The greatest contributor to, and reasons for divisiveness and war have always been from people thinking that their way is the only and absolute way.

    If you’re not currently doing so, I invite you to get involved with the Mozilla Project to discover for yourself that Mozillians are awesome, real, kind, and selfless people that come from nearly every imaginable walk of life, culture, and have different political and religious views as well as just having different opinions on what they believe that Mozilla and its projects and products should be yet we all respect each other.

    If this was my blog, I would have said “prayers” but it isn’t and it doesn’t bother me a bit that the word “prayers” wasn’t mentioned as I’m sure that it wouldn’t have bothered anyone if it was my blog and I had said “prayers”.

    We aim to think bigger and focus on freedom and choice.

  7. Jon wrote on :

    Who turns off the Haiti internet every night from 10PM to 6AM?

  8. Cornelius wrote on :

    Can we get more information on the daily pings coming from users, such as a CSV of daily pings by country for the last X days? That would be awesome info to have … thanks!

  9. Haiti pride wrote on :

    We are a strong nation, we will rebuild again.