Flow announced today (December 07, 2020) that it had restored connectivity to its networks in the South Caribbean.

Beginning at 8:00am this morning, its Internet service in Trinidad and Tobago was severely impacted, along with Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, St Vincent and Grenada.

According to Flow’s release, “the issue was identified as a loss of power on a link in Curacao that provides critical capacity for local internet traffic.”

What Flow described as “degraded services such as slower internet speeds and intermittent buffering when using broadband services” was an unusable Internet experience for most users.

Flow parent company Liberty Latin America is a regional provider of bulk broadband capacity, so other ISPs in TT were affected, including Digicel.

A press release from Digicel described the outage as the result of “a series of unfortunate events.”

“Last week there was a significant subsea fibre break between Guadeloupe and Antigua. This affected some Digicel+ customers and, unfortunately, that problem is still being dealt with,” said Chandrika Samaroo, Operations Director at Digicel. “To help maintain connectivity, Digicel re-routed service through an alternate path via the same upstream supplier through Curacao. On Monday morning, however, there was a major island-wide power outage in Curacao that disrupted that path as well. Once that happened, services here in Trinidad and Tobago were also affected.”

“This sequence of events did not totally interrupt service since Digicel maintains another layer of diversity in our network that supported a significant percentage of our traffic. However, the outage did cause massive amounts of congestion on both our mobile and fibre networks.”

The University of the West Indies issued an advisory to its students, acknowledging the connectivity issues, particularly for students expected to do examinations today.

“All affected students will be afforded the opportunity to complete their examinations,” UWI’s statement said.

The Telecommunications Authority of TT issued a statement promising a resolution by midday and debunking a widely circulated 2015 statement on an outage caused by activity at the Kick ’em Jenny undersea volcano (reported here).

bmobile reported that its Internet access was unaffected, but it was engaging in load balancing exercises “because mobile internet customers who would customarily split their internet usage between the two mobile networks are now utilizing their bmobile network exclusively.”

The company issued a follow-up release noting that it had been successful in easing the congestion for its mobile users after it “increased the backend system to support the additional demand.”

Flow apologised for the outage in their press statement and promised to “do everything in our power to ensure that our customers remain connected to the things that matter most.”