[Hurricane Melissa Causes Internet Outage in Jamaica, Bitchat Tops Local App Charts] According to Decrypt, this week, Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica, becoming the strongest cyclone in decades. It caused island-wide power and telecommunications outages, severely disrupting communication. Data from internet monitoring agency NetBlocks shows that the country's internet connectivity dropped to about 30% of normal levels, with strong winds and line interruptions leading to widespread outages. During this time, the peer-to-peer instant messaging app Bitchat, which operates without requiring an internet connection, saw a surge in downloads in Jamaica. According to AppFigures data, at the time of writing, Bitchat ranked first among social networking apps for Apple users and second overall in the free app charts for both Apple and Android. Its developer Calle stated on the X platform that this was the app's "first surge in downloads caused by a natural disaster."