Outage at Flow impacts 911 service

| 06/11/2015 | 36 Comments

Cayman News Service(CNS): Cable & Wireless’ rebranded telecommunication network, Flow, experienced a widespread outage Friday morning that impacted all of its customers, as well as the emergency services communications, since their customers were unable to dial even 911. A spokesperson for Flow said the significant technical outage on mobile voice calls started in the early hours but was restored at around 8:45am.

The Department of Public Safety Communications (DPSC), which runs the 911 call centre, said they were informed of the outage at around 5:30am but it was not until 9:30 that calls to 911 could be made to them from Flow phones.

DPSC Director Brent Finster said that, as at 12:30pm on Friday, 911 had still not been informed about the reason for the outage, though they remained in touch with the Information Communications and Technology Authority (ICTA), which was investigating the local outage that lasted more than four hours.

Flow did not detail the cause of the outage but apologized to customers.

“We understanding how important being able to communicate is to our customers and want to sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused and assure you that although technology systems can fail from time to time, we have a 24/7 regional restoration team on standby and have made significant progress in recent months to minimise problems,” the firm stated, adding that it was its goal to deliver excellent service to our customers.

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  1. Anonymous says:

    Customers should send a very large message to FLOW by removing their patronage — moving to LOGIC. Companies that offer a dreadful service and milk their customers in the process should pay a large price. Sometimes we forget the power of the people.

  2. Anonymous says:

    No matter what anyone says Digicel customers rarely switch to Lime or Slime or flow or whatever they are. Digicel may have its faults but they seem to troubleshoot their upgrades before it affects everyone the way I see Flows customers get affected. I constantly have seen since the start of line portability that friends that have had lime from Jesus was a boy have switched to Digicel! That should say it all! Even corporate customers. I don’t work for digicel or have shares im just a satisfied customer all around!

  3. Jen says:

    My concern is that branding changes should not negatively impact quality of service. However, throughout the various changes we have experienced from Cable & Wireless to Lime to Flow what i have experienced is constant frustrations with what appears to be a decrease in quality and reliability of service and dealing with persons who are located off Island who are suppose to provide customer service support. Slow internet connections; dropped calls; delayed notifications for voice mail etc. Promotional texts and messages seem to have no problem getting through.

    Upto yesterday i was contacted by someone who had sent through 3 text messages to my phone, none of which came through. He kept getting some error message.

    Rebranding is fine, but please ensure the quality of service is enhanced and does not further deteriorate.

  4. Anonymous says:

    They should not give you a 3 month time frame to use up credit that you purchased from them and if it is not used in the 3 months – they take it from you – that’s stealing!

    • Anonymous says:

      They don’t even give you 3 months. They cleaned mine out after 6 weeks and couldn’t explain why. I guess they expect you to give up the small amount, which is exactly what I ended up doing.

  5. Anonymous says:

    Hey Flow. Or Lime. Or C&W. Or whatever your next new name is. How about putting all your wasted rebranding money into improving your pathetic customer service. Then you might get somewhere. Just sayin.

  6. Knot S Smart says:

    Lime is no better than Cable and Wireless and Flow is no better than Lime…
    Wait…
    They are one and the same?
    I guess I’m a bit like the internet speed at Flow – Slow…

  7. Anonymous says:

    I suspect police response times improved…..

  8. Anonymous says:

    Cable & Wireless can re-brand with new names for their retail branch until pigs fly. Its still the same crappy service!! That’s where they need to make real change!!

  9. Anonymous says:

    FLOW (Following LIME Od Ways)

  10. Anonymous says:

    Intermittent FLOW? That’s the worst.

  11. Anonymous says:

    We can’t dial 911 but they can still send spam texts about some crappy promotions O_o

  12. Anonymous says:

    And what is the ICTA doing about FLOW?

  13. Anonymous says:

    Clearly too busy spamming everyone with texts about winning a car. Only $1 a go. If that’s not gambling, or using an ITC network to harass, I’m a Chinaman

  14. Anonymous says:

    So far Flow has been a nightmare. I have been without home internet for days and no sign of promised tech calls. They seem to be worse than Lime, and they were not good.

    • Anonymous says:

      Flow has also dropped all of their Canadian channels too in all their packages. Guess no one told them in marketing that 5,000 Canadians live on island. We will be moving to LOGIC soon.

  15. Anonymous says:

    I wish those “pay to play trivia” messages would have an outage.

  16. Philip says:

    This started yesterday late afternoon, Flow really need to be pro active in reporting these outages, yet at 11am this morning they still managed to send me a text about winning a car!, come on get your act together, same goes for many customers not getting voice mail notifactions for the last few weeks, i was told that i was a problem with my phone how ever i have not done anything to try to correct “my phone” and voila i started to receive notifications on Saturday, along with everyone else i know that uses Flow.

  17. Anonymous says:

    The problem is because the Cayman network is managed by other countries, and as I understand it not only do we not manage it but the core equipment is also situated overseas.

    THis is not progress, because in the good old days at least we had control of everything.

  18. Anonymous says:

    Customer service is seriously lacking at SLOW / SLIME / Careless & Worthless.

    • Anonymous says:

      never seen anything like it….. and i hate to say it…but it is not a good reflection on their predominantly caymanian workforce…….

      • Anonymous says:

        Anyone you are speaking to on the telephone is in El Salvador, and many of those I have engaged with in person are Jamaican, so do not bring Caymanians issues into this.

        • Bluff Patrol says:

          You are grossly incorrect to suggest that their current service issues are related to the number of Caymanians in their workforce.

          I’m afraid you seem to be lacking the history of this company in Cayman.

          Back in the 80’s and 90’s their workforce was predominantly Caymanian and their service was significantly better (although significantly more expensive due to their monopoly status at the time).

    • Just driftwood says:

      Agree completely. Their customer service is such a joke that we refer to promising to do something we have no intention of doing as a lime promise a la callbacks from their “customer service”.

  19. Bluff Patrol says:

    Such failures where 911 Emergency Services cannot be contacted put Public Safety at risk and may even lead to preventable deaths in cases where an ambulance cannot be summoned.

    This is a prime example where a fine from the ICTA would be justified.

    • Horse & Buggy on the Autobahn says:

      If I provide a critical service, such as 911, it is my responsibility to ensure that I have redundancy in place and not have a single point of failure for that service. The Police Commissioner needs to answer why 911 did not have a backup ISP (Digicel, Logic, etc.).

      I also agree with ISPs paying penalties for major (lengthy) outages, which this one was, simply because whether 911 is down, or i can’t call it because mobile service is down both have the same result.

      I know the internet wasn’t down, but the way FLOW treats residential and commercial customers re internet outages shows that they have no clue how vital these services has really become. Up to now I haven’t received an apology text or email to my company. Oh well!

      Who’s going to sign up for FLOW, err I mean SLOW TV if it depends on SLOW internet? I don’t need an iPhone that bad!

      • anon says:

        The Police Commissioner does not have control over 911. He has nothing to answer for in this matter. 911 is a separate department entirely.

    • Anonymous says:

      Please note that each provider has their own link into 911, if you were calling 911 from another provider and couldn’t get through its their fault.

      911 should also have more than one link for outgoing calls, if they don’t that is their fault.

      Outages will happen, regardless of what anyone says. Anything man made can and will fail at some point.

      • Anonymous says:

        Including your though process about redundancies my friend…. Yes, you are man made too…

      • Anonymous says:

        One sole support of FLOW hanging on by a thread.

      • anon says:

        Of course having redundancy doesn’t help much when the phone you are trying to reach is out of service due to the network provider’s system problem.

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