Communications outage resolved ahead of storm

(CNS): OfReg said that all communications services were restored at around 2:30am on Tuesday after an issue that mainly impacted Flow and Digicel’s business customers. The regulator said it was now awaiting the final outage resolution reports, which are expected within 14 days from the date of resolution, when a “thorough review to assess the issues and overall impact” will be conducted. On Monday evening, OfReg officials stressed their concern about such an outage on the eve of a storm.

Once it has received and reviewed those reports, OfReg will determine any necessary subsequent actions. The regulator said the outage had been treated as a “severity 1” given the gravity of the weather situation.

“Reliable telecommunications service must be treated as a human right,” said OfReg CEO Sonji Myles. “For us, [the] priority is to have service restored, and from there, we will be seriously investigating the cause with a view to ensure actions are taken to make sure that such an outage, where avoidable, does not occur again in the future.”

The service outage impacted store point-of-sale card machines, ATMs, mobile calls between Flow and Digicel and some fixed-line business customers. Flow-to-Flow calls are working, as are Digicel-to-Digicel calls, but calls between the two networks were down for the latter part of Monday and into the night.