A nearly 19-hour total connectivity blackout for thousands of Flow customers across Dominica and St. Lucia has prompted regional telecommunications regulators to issue a formal call for residents and businesses to prepare backup communication strategies, to buffer against the crippling impact of future unplanned network disruptions.
The widespread service shutdown began at approximately 5:30 p.m. local time on Sunday, June 21, and stretched into midday the following day, with full network access only restored by 12:40 p.m. on June 22, according to a joint statement released by the National Telecommunications Regulatory Commissions (NTRCs) of Dominica and St. Lucia, alongside the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL).
Preliminary investigations into the root cause of the outage trace the failure back to a critical fault along a core fibre transmission line connecting Guadeloupe and Antigua, a key route that supports connectivity for Flow customers across the two affected Eastern Caribbean islands. At the height of the disruption, Flow issued an immediate public notice confirming the technical fault, and reassured users that technical teams were working around the clock to bring services back online.
In the wake of the restoration, regulators confirmed they have launched a formal inquiry, requesting a full detailed report from Flow that outlines exactly what led to the extended outage. For its part, Flow has already committed to rolling out targeted upgrades to boost its network resilience and lower the probability of similar large-scale disruptions in the future. Proposed improvements under consideration include alternative routing solutions, a full industry audit of existing network route redundancies, and the construction of new parallel fibre pathways to add critical backup capacity to the core network.
Regional regulators say they will conduct a thorough review of Flow’s proposed mitigation measures, before expanding the assessment to broader resilience reforms that would cover all telecommunications operators operating across ECTEL’s member contracting states. In their statement, the regulatory bodies acknowledged the extensive disruption the blackout inflicted on local communities, noting that the outage hit particularly hard for users who depend on constant, uninterrupted connectivity for daily work, medical services and critical business operations.
“We will continue to monitor the situation and review the information provided by the operator to ensure that appropriate steps are taken to improve long-term service reliability,” the joint statement read. “Beyond the reforms operators implement, we encourage all members of the public to proactively develop their own backup and redundant communication plans, to prepare for any future unexpected outages.”
The agencies also reaffirmed their ongoing commitment to fostering a stable, reliable telecommunications ecosystem that serves all users across the Eastern Caribbean region, and pledged to uphold full transparency around the causes of and responses to any future network outage incidents.