URCO (OfReg) Concerned Over Prolonged Disruption of Flow TV Services; Calls for Greater Local Resilience and Accountability

The Utility Regulation and Competition Office (URCO) is closely monitoring an ongoing outage affecting Flow’s television services across the Cayman Islands. The disruption, which began on 14 June 2025 at 1:00 PM, is attributed to a power interruption at Flow’s regional offshore data centre in Curaçao, which houses and manages the affected TV systems for several country markets. As of today, updates from Flow Cayman confirm that the issue continues to affect a significant portion (approximately 1500) of its IPTV subscribers, with restoration delayed due to software issues and hardware damage at the foreign facility. 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. However, Flow is unable to give an estimated time of restoration. URCO remains in constant contact with Flow’s technical team, seeking timely updates and pressing for a swift resolution. However, it is 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. But we will not stop there -it is 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.’’ While URCO acknowledges that technical failures are, at times, unavoidable, the gaps in adequate redundancy and disaster recovery protocols are a serious regulatory and customer service issue. Furthermore, URCO firmly believes that customers should not be billed for services they are not receiving and will address this directly with Flow, as well as PO Box 10189 Grand Cayman KY1-1102 Cayman Islands Tel: (345) 946-4282 UTILITY REGULATION AND COMPETITION OFFICE 2 continue to ensure available consumer protections are enforced under existing legislation, and also to propose such necessary provisions when lobbying the government to implement necessary legislative updates to support better service reliability and accountability. URCO will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates as they become available. The Office remains committed to ensuring that consumers in the Cayman Islands receive the reliable services they are entitled to and to holding licensees accountable at all times.