Storm shoppers face long lines, debit card and ATM outages

Shoppers faced long waits and frustration at the tills Monday as a telecoms outage impacted efforts to stock up on supplies ahead of Tropical Storm Rafael.

Some residents waited in long lines but were unable to pay for their items, with certain stores – including Priced Right – only able to accept cash because of disruption to banking and point-of-sale services.

Telecoms regulator OfReg said it was investigating the issue, describing it as a “serious concern” of “severity 1”. The regulator issued a brief additional statement Tuesday confirming that all services had been restored as of 2.30am.

By that time, however, the stores were closed as the storm approached.

Savannah resident Rob Tyler queued up for almost an hour at Foster’s Countryside Monday evening with a trolley-load of shopping, having just arrived back on island with his wife and five-month old baby after a long-haul flight.

But when he finally got to the cashier, he was told that they weren’t able to accept card payments, so he couldn’t pay for his shopping. The store ATM was down, so he couldn’t get any cash out either.

“They said they were able to do the card payment manually, but only if you had an old-style card with the raised numbers,” said Rob. “It was so frustrating after queuing all that time, especially as we needed formula for our baby.”

Defeated, Rob left empty-handed, but all was not lost – he went instead to Hurley’s, which remained unaffected by the internet chaos.

One Facebook user wrote that card machines were down at the Foster’s at Camana Bay but that workers were “taking card details to process once back online”.

A member of the ‘Women in Cayman’ Facebook group encouraged frustrated shoppers to try again if they had been turned away due to the system outages, saying, “They are writing down the card details and will run them later when the system is back up. Go back if you can.”

As of press time, Hurley’s and Kirk Market had no reported issues of point-of-sale or debit card handling.

Banking and telecoms issues

Meanwhile, Butterfield ATMs showed an ‘Out of Service’ message and an apology for the inconvenience.

Cayman National advised that it was experiencing an ATM and call centre service disruption as well.

Flow confirmed that customers were experiencing phone service interruptions.

“Our technicians are actively working to investigate and resolve the source of the interruption as quickly as possible,” the company posted.

Digicel also reported service interruptions impacting users in Cayman Brac and Little Cayman.

“We are collaborating with the other operators and regulator to resolve the matter,” Digicel said.

Woody Foster, managing director of Foster’s supermarket, told the Compass that issues with Flow was the cause of the checkout problems being experienced at the islands’ supermarkets.

“Flow has a major issue and all the internet lines are down, so there’s no ATMs, no internet. It’s affected us greatly. It’s a huge problem as the stores are packed with people, so we’re having to do it manually which is a complete and utter nightmare, but it is what it is,” he said.

“It’s Flow and it’s island-wide, so all the banks are affected and there’s no service which is a huge problem … There are huge queues in the stores because of the storm so it’s the last thing we need to go through; it’s making cashiers really stressed.”

In spite of the issue, he confirmed that stores were still going to close at 10pm as planned.

“Flow haven’t given us a time of when it’s going to be fixed, which they usually do, so it looks like it’s a big issue,” Foster said.

“They usually fix things like this pretty quickly but it’s been going on for quite a long time now and they still haven’t found a solution.”

‘Severity 1’ emergency

Regulators said they were looking into the telecoms issue.

The Utility Regulation and Competition Office wrote, in a statement to the Compass, “OfReg is aware of mobile call outages between Flow and Digicel, as well as reports of internet service degradation. We are in contact with both providers and can confirm they are actively working to resolve these issues.

“Flow to Flow calls are working as are Digicel to Digicel. However, calls between the two networks are not.

“Some business customers are also impacted, rendering some point of sale card readers and some ATMs inoperable.”

The regulator said it was in contact with service operators and treating the event as “severity 1”.

OfReg CEO Sonji Myles said in a written statement, “The gravity of this outage is a serious concern which is only further compounded by the fact that there is an impending storm.

“Reliable telecommunications service must be treated as a human right. For us, 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.”

In a follow-up statement Tuesday morning, OfReg added that service had been restored as of 2:30 a.m.

“We are currently awaiting final outage resolution reports, which are expected within 14 days from the date of resolution. Upon receipt of these reports, we will conduct a thorough review to assess the issues and overall impact. Based on this analysis, we will determine any necessary subsequent actions.”

Stores closed Tuesday

Earlier on Monday, all major supermarkets announced they would be closing Tuesday.

All Foster’s supermarkets will be closed all day, as will Kirk’s, Hurley’s, Cost-U-Less and Priced Right.

Foster told the Compass that he had hoped the stores would remain open on Tuesday as the storm approached, but made the call on Monday afternoon to close that day, after the latest weather update showed that that the expected the storm would be classed as a hurricane by the time it reached the Cayman Islands.

“We’re out of some items but, by the time we open up on Wednesday, we should have been able to replenish most things as we have them in our warehouses,” he said.

“Paper products such as toilet paper and paper towels always typically get hit pretty hard, but we have plenty of water, canned goods and other items.”

He added that he was confident that the stores would reopen on Wednesday but that shoppers should also check for updates regarding the weather.

Correction: Logic has confirmed that it was wrongly identified as one of the sources of the problems in an earlier version of this article. Compass apologises for the error.