Rogers ‘making progress’ on fixing massive outage snarling telecom, banking and government services
Telecommunications giant Rogers says it is making progress on fixing a massive outage to its network on Friday that is impacting wireless, cable and internet customers across the country.
The outage began some time in the early hours of Friday morning, with a wide variety of services affected.
Later in the day, Rogers told CBC News in a statement that it is getting closer to finding a solution.
“Our technical teams are working to restore our services alongside our global technology partners, and are making progress,” the company said.
“We know how much you rely on our networks. Today we have let you down. We are working to make this right as quickly as we can. We will continue to keep you updated, including when services will be back online.”
In an earlier statement, the company apologized to its customers and said the outage was “across our wireline and wireless networks.”
The company has approximately 9 million wireless customers and just shy of 3 million customers on the cable and internet side of the business.
Internet monitoring watchdog group Netblocks.org reports that total internet traffic in Canada was at 75 per cent of its normal level on Friday morning.
Wide variety of services impacted
Rogers-owned flanker brands like Fido and Chatr are also offline, but even services not directly controlled by Rogers, such as emergency services, travel and financial networks, are having problems.
Debit payment services have also been interrupted.
“A nationwide telecommunications outage with a network provider … is impacting the availability of some Interac services,” a spokesperson for Interac confirmed to CBC News.
“Debit is currently unavailable online and at checkout. Interac e-Transfer is also widely unavailable, impacting the ability to send and receive payments.”
Bell confirmed that it is having no issues on its network, although it says customers are having difficulties connecting to anything on a Rogers network.
“The Bell network is operational and calls and texts between Bell customers or to other providers are not impacted,” the company said on Twitter.
CBC’s radio station in Kitchener, Ont., has been taken offline and off the air as a result of the outage.
911 problems
The Toronto Police Service tweeted that Rogers customers in that city were having trouble connecting to 911, but stressed that the 911 service itself was working properly, as long as people weren’t calling from a Rogers-affiliated device.
“We are working to resolve these issues,” the force said.
Other emergency services reported a similar status.
“Although Rogers is experiencing a nationwide outage, our tests have shown 911 is still working,” a spokesperson for the Fredericton Police Service told CBC News.
Officials in Winnipeg and Vancouver also stressed that emergency services are operational, but people on the Rogers network can’t seem to access them.
Under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rules in place since 2017, telecom networks are supposed to ensure that cellphones are able to contact 911 even if they do not have service.
Canada’s telecom regulator did not immediately reply to a request from CBC News as to whether the 911 problems seen Friday are in breach of those rules. In a tweet, the CRTC said it also doesn’t have reliable phone service due to the Rogers outage.
Please note that our phone lines are affected by the Rogers network outage.<br>Our website is still available: <a href=”https://t.co/Sws6CGGQ2m”>https://t.co/Sws6CGGQ2m</a>
—@CRTCeng
Outage ‘incomprehensible’ to Canadians
They aren’t the only ones. Ordinary Canadians told the CBC on Friday that the outage is unacceptable.
“This can’t happen again without changes being made,” Torontonian Andrew Revai told CBC News. “People can tweet all the memes they want about losing connectivity but how will Rogers keep this from happening again?”
WATCH | Here’s what regular Canadians told us about the Rogers outage: 
Major Rogers outage hits businesses, customers across Canada
3 hours ago
Duration 1:46
Rogers customers were caught off guard by Friday’s massive outage involving both mobile and internet networks, which also caused widespread disruption for banks, businesses and some emergency services across Canada.
Ottawa resident Robert Hubscher said “it’s incomprehensible” that a company as big as Rogers could have an outage this widespread for this long.
He uses Rogers for his cellphone and home internet, and said in an interview Friday that he is glad he has some services with other companies to maintain connections right now.
“It’s a little scary that the regulatory bodies are not looking at this more seriously,” Hubscher said.
Government services including already bottlenecked passport offices, Service Canada, Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency are also affected.
The Canadian Border Services Agency says the ArriveCan app is disabled as a result of the outage, and as a result anyone arriving in Canada will have to have a paper copy of their vaccination status.
Rogers offered rebates after last outage
Telecom analyst Vince Valentini with TD Bank, who covers the company, says it’s not good for the company’s reputation to have an outage of this scale, especially since it seems to be across all of its services, from internet to wireless.
“The longer this situation lasts, we believe there could be minor risks to customer churn,” he said. “And also there could be credibility issues for Rogers in the future as it attempts to ramp up sales.”
It’s the second time in as many years that Rogers has been rocked by a major outage, as the company’s wireless and cable networks went down in a similar fashion in April 2021. At the time, Rogers blamed an issue with a software update at one of its telecom equipment suppliers.
That time, the company offered customers rebates for their services, which ended up working out to a few dollars per customer. If the same metric is applied this time, Valentini says the company could be on the hook for about $28 million in rebates.
Technology analyst Ritesh Kotak says he suspects the cause of the outage is “an update gone wrong” in one of Rogers’ internal systems.
Economic vulnerability
Regardless of why, Kotak says it underscores how vulnerable Canada’s economy is to outages like this, and says he makes sure all his telecom services come from different providers for this exact reason.
“It shows just how reliant we are on this technology,” he said in an interview. “From some government services … to working from home, all that has literally been shut down.”
Vass Bednar, executive director of of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in digital society program, says the outage underlines a long-simmering problem with Canada’s telecom network, which is that both the infrastructure and the services themselves are owned by private companies.
That’s not the case everywhere in the world, where private sector players control one or the other, and often compete with a public option.
“The internet and cellular services … seem like a public good,” she told CBC News in an interview Friday. “They seem like critical digital infrastructure that we all need to use, and yet they are privately owned and operated.”
“Maybe it’s time for Canadians to seriously rethink that.”
Your post on Magazine (https://Artmotion.com)
