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What is the real reason of Rogers service went down?
Telecommunications giant Rogers says it is making progress on fixing a massive outage to its network on Friday (July08 2022) that is impacting wireless, cable and internet customers across the country.
“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.”
A message from Tony Staffieri, President and CEO at Rogers
Rogers has approximately 9 million wireless customers and about 3 million customers on the internet cable.
Rogers-owned flanker brands like Fido and Chatr were also offline, but even services not directly controlled by Rogers, such as emergency services, travel and financial networks, were having problems. Debit payment services have also been interrupted. Bank machines and other financial networks across the country were down, seemingly due to the issues at Rogers.
As a result, coffee shops with working Wi-Fi saw a flood of internet-hungry customers flood their businesses.
Besides Starbucks, there were a number places across the city that have been letting residents know they have functioning WiFi.
“We’re seeing people at Square One, Yorkdale and Scarborough Town Centre using our free WiFi throughout our centres. We welcome the community to use our WiFi access during this service disruption,” said Lucia Connor, Vice President Retail Marketing, Oxford Properties.
The Eaton Centre, Shops at Don Mills, Dufferin Mall, Fairview Mall and Cloverdale Mall are also shopping centres where free WiFi is available.
Toronto libraries also have WiFi for residents, though many have reported slow connectivity.
GO York concourse at Union Station has free WIFI along with TTC stations.
In the Financial District, the Exchange Food Tower at First Canadian Place has had open WiFi too.
City Hall, Etobicoke, Scarborough and North York civic centres also offer free WiFi on the ground floor and in certain public areas.
Following a day of widespread outages on Friday, Rogers said services have been restored for “the vast majority” of its customers as of Saturday morning (July09 2022).
Rogers says it will be automatically crediting customers to make up for the lost service.
It’s interesting that the outage comes as the Competition Bureau fights against Rogers’ planned acquisition of Shaw Communications, which would further Rogers’ dominance in the country. The bureau fears the merger would prevent a reliable fourth carrier from breaking through the monopoly created by Rogers and fellow giants Bell and Telus.
When the outage began Friday, Rogers, Shaw and the Competition Bureau had just wrapped a two-day mediation period that ended with no resolution.
Some people believe that a cyber attack was a real reason of today’s Rogers outage and service down but “they can never admit it because they will lose their customer base”.
Officially Rogers said the root cause of the intermittent wireless service was a software update by its network partner Ericsson.
Technology analyst Ritesh Kotak says that some ” update gone wrong” in one of Rogers’ internal systems.
Also 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.
Vass Bednar, executive director of of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in digital society program, says “The internet and cellular services … seem like a public good. They seem like critical digital infrastructure that we all need to use, and yet they are privately owned and operated.”
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, Rogers could be on the hook for about $28 million in rebates.
Currently we have only 2 Cyber Monsters in Canada – Bell & Rogers. Today Rogers outage shows that competition in the market place is important. Maybe it’s time for Canadians to seriously rethink that.
What if the next time Rogers and Bell internet service simultaneously goes down?