$32 million loss for telecoms provider in Tuesday's network outage

By Kimone Witter    

 

It has been disclosed that Tuesday's network outage resulted in over $30 million in damage for one of the two main telecommunications providers - FLOW and Digicel.

 

The outage was caused by vandalism of fibre optic cables.

 

Telecommunications Minister Daryl Vaz gave a breakdown of the losses incurred by one of the providers, which he did not name, while addressing Friday's sitting of the Standing Finance Committee of Parliament which is reviewing the 2025/2026 Estimates of Expenditure.

 

"From information received from one telecommunication service provider, in excess of [US$]200,000 or J$32 million worth of damage was occasioned to the network because of this action. And this figure does not take into account the costs associated with having to mobilise a crew to work assiduously to have the fiber repaired within the day, nor the impact of the thousands of customers who are affected," the minister lamented. 

 

He again condemned the "random acts of vandalism" which he said was caused by persons with nefarious intent. 

 

The telecommunications companies are to provide formal incident reports to the minister.