Rare internet outage strikes Barbados, Eastern Caribbean

A rare Internet blackout struck Barbados and across six Eastern Caribbean nations on Monday morning, as a fault in the region’s mainline connection to the internet triggered outages and bothersome delays on mobile and broadband internet services.

The region’s two largest telecoms, FLOW and DIGICEL, each confirmed “an ongoing issue affecting mobile data, broadband, landline and television services” as customers experienced slow buffering and browsing.

In addition to the impact on individuals and businesses, the disruption in internet service forced the University of West Indies at Cave Hill Campus to reschedule the start of the semester’s examinations.

In a statement, the UWI said: “The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus wishes to announce that due to today’s island-wide disruption in Internet services, the start of the second semester examination period originally scheduled for 7th December to 22nd December, suffered a major setback. A number of students were unable to access or complete their online examinations. A full impact assessment is being undertaken by relevant campus authorities to ascertain the scale of the problem.”

Noting that the outage also affected a number of neighbouring Caribbean countries, UWI announced a rescheduling of this semester’s examinations, “the majority of which are taking place online because of COVID-19 restrictions. In this regard, most of the 34 exams that were to be held today, 7th December, and tomorrow, 8th December, have been postponed.”

This evening, when FLOW had announced that “full connectivity has been restored to all impacted customers”, UWI administrators declared that all exams were to resume on Wednesday. “All examinations previously slated for the December 9-22 period remain unaffected and will proceed as originally scheduled,” the campus said.

At the height of the disruption, rumours spread online that sought to link the disruption in internet service In Port of Spain to activity at the Kick-‘em-Jenny underwear volcano off northern Grenada.

But the Trinidad-based University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre (UWI-SRC) dismissed the suggestion, advising that  “no unusual activity was detected” at the volcano.

“The UWI-SRC has not detected any activity in the territories in which it operates that is likely to be linked to interruptions in internet service currently being experienced in Trinidad & Tobago,” the unit said in a statement.

By mid-morning Digicel reported to its customers that normal service had resumed.

But the two telecoms giants who share connections to the global computer network, appeared to offer differing accounts on the cause of the data blackout.

In a statement, Digicel said that its international capacity providers experienced a sub-sea fibre optic cable fault.

“As of 11:30 a.m., the majority of this connectivity has been restored and our technical teams continue to be in communication  with our international capacity providers as they work to repair the remaining damaged submarine cables.”

FLOW announced that its customers were back online at 2 p.m.

“Flow Barbados has restored full connectivity for customers who may have been experiencing issues with their mobile data, broadband, landline and television services earlier today.

“This issue also impacted other markets throughout the South Caribbean including Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago,” the company said in a statement.

It attributed the loss of connectivity “to a power outage on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, which affected a link that “provides critical capacity for local internet traffic”.

“As a result, customers in Barbados experienced degraded services such as slower internet speeds and intermittent buffering when using broadband and mobile data services.

“Our engineers worked to restore full connectivity and we also leveraged our resources across the Caribbean to ensure reliable connections were re-established and internet traffic is once again stable.” (SD)