UPDATE – 19 June 2025 7:55am: Flow Country Manager Bruno Delhaise responded Wednesday evening by saying: “Flow technical teams have worked relentlessly to solve an issue affecting some of our TV customers. We are able to confirm that as of 4pm today, TV service was restored for the vast majority of these customers.
“Flow sincerely apologizes for the inconvenience this disruption has caused and thank our valued customers for their patience and understanding. We know how important reliable service is to everyday life, and we remain dedicated to providing the quality and consistency you expect from Flow.”
Original story:
The Utility Regulation and Competition Office (URCO) issued a press statement on Wednesday expressing its concern for the ongoing outage of Flow’s television service across the Cayman Islands.
The outage, which began at 1pm on Saturday, 14 June, has been attributed to a power interruption at Flow’s regional offshore data centre in Curaçao, which houses and manages the affected television systems for several country markets. As of Wednesday, approximately 1,500 of Flow’s Internet Protocol TV subscribers were still affected by the outage because of “software issues and hardware damage at the foreign facility”, URCO (also known as OfReg) said in the press release.
“While mobile voice services and some IPTV functionalities were temporarily restored using workarounds, full-scale recovery of all systems has proven elusive. Updates from Flow suggest recovery work is still ongoing,” the press release added. “However, Flow is unable to give an estimated time of restoration.”
URCO said that it was “increasingly clear that local technicians are limited in their ability to resolve these issues directly, highlighting an unacceptable level of dependence on systems and personnel located outside the Cayman Islands”.
“The Cayman Islands is a critical commercial market for Flow and that deserves the same
or greater reliability and resilience over any other jurisdiction,” said URCO CEO Sonji Myles.
“It is deeply concerning that services so vital to our community can be disrupted for days due to failures in another country – with limited local capacity to respond. We are calling on
all service providers to reassess their infrastructure strategies and ensure that robust redundancies are in place to protect Cayman consumers.”
Myles added that it was “time for clearer obligations and enforcement where necessary.
“This is not just about technical resilience; it’s about ensuring that consumers are getting the quality of service they pay for and deserve.’’
According to Flow’s website, its TV service costs between $40 and $120 per month, depending on the number of channels in the plan chosen. When bundled with internet service, the cost is between $119 and $219 per month.
URCO stated that it “firmly believes that customers should not be billed for services they are not receiving and will address this directly with Flow” and said it would “ensure available consumer protections are enforced under existing legislation”. It also suggested it could lobby the government to “implement necessary legislative updates to support better service reliability and accountability”.
Flow was contacted for comment about the outage and URCO’s statement but had not responded at the time of writing.
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Besides being a large global financial centre, Cayman’s telecommunications customers should not be at the mercies of other countries hosting the core systems for Flow et al. If there is civil or other disaster in these countries Cayman is SHUT DOWN!.
We have been seeing these problems for over 1 year since Flow has moved many systems from Cayman. This is unacceptable. The Law need to give URCO the necessary authority to make necessary demands or take action.