Crowd-sourcing sites, such as are helping to disseminate information about Haiti to companies around the world as well as international relief organizations.

Ory Okolloh, a South Africa-based Kenyan lawyer and co-founder of Ushahidi, said the site has received very little traffic from Haiti, which suggests that what little IT infrastructure there was has been "significantly" disrupted.

Most of "the mobile network still appears to be down, though [we're] getting reports that Blackberry is working. We've been struggling to get a local line or short code [numbers] that people can use," he wrote in an e-mail response to Computerworld. "Radio stations also appear to be down."

Okolloh said there are indications that some Haitians are able to communicate via satellite phone and to get online via satellite. Twitter and other social network sites for communications in the hours and days after the earthquake.

"So it's not a complete blackout," Okolloh said. "I've seen urgent requests for satellite phones to be donated for Haiti government officials."