MPs on the House of Commons Industry and Technology committee voted unanimously on Friday to study the Rogers Communications outage, with at least two meetings scheduled before July 30.
Members will invite company executives, representatives from the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne to speak about the outage that caused millions of customers to lose internet and services. wireless a week ago.
They will review the causes of the disruption and the impact on Canadians, consumers and businesses across the health care, law enforcement and financial sectors, as well as best practices to prevent a situation from happening again Similary.
The meeting is in response to requests from Liberal, Conservative and NDP MPs.
“The liberal members of this committee share the frustration millions of Canadians experienced last week when Rogers experienced an unprecedented system failure and seek to fairly and thoroughly examine this issue on his behalf.” read a letter written by liberal parliamentarians.
Rogers says the “network system failure” was caused by a core network maintenance update, causing the routers to malfunction.
In a status update on the situation Wednesday, Rogers Chairman and CEO Tony Staffieri called the network outage “unacceptable” and said the company is doing everything it can to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“Our customer service representatives are working around the clock and have caught up with the backlog of issues. We have also increased credit on bills for all of our customers, as some of you experienced longer delays in resuming services,” the statement read.
The company announced this week that it would reimburse customers for up to five days of service for inconvenience.
A spokesperson for Rogers confirmed to CTVNews.ca on Friday that the executives will attend and provide testimony to the committee to help with the study.
“We will work collaboratively with members of the Industry, Science and Technology Standing Committee to provide details on the cause of the outage and the actions we are taking to improve the reliability of each of our networks going forward, including through agreements. formal mutual. support agreements,” said Nilani Logeswaran.
Bloq Quebecois MP Martin Champoux and NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice also proposed inviting Public Security Minister Marco Mendicino to testify regarding cybersecurity threats.
“There are issues of security and national protection. We cannot ignore the idea that there could also be potential cyber threats from various hostile states now and in the future,” said Boulerice.
However, Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith opposed the move.
“I think we are allowing ourselves to exploit this unnecessarily,” Erskine-Smith said.
“The importance of a narrow focus here is accountability so we understand what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again and network resiliency is the ultimate responsibility of the CRTC and the minister of industry.”
The committee decided that they would drop the proposal to invite Mendicino to the fall, if they still believe it is necessary.
Champagne met Monday with the CEO of Rogers and the heads of other telecom service providers. During the meeting, he tasked them with creating a formal agreement, within 60 days, to pool resources, ensure emergency roaming and develop a communications plan to better inform Canadians during crises.
A spokesman for the Champagne office said they are “aware” of the invitation to appear before the committee and will “continue to engage” with members.
The CRTC is also looking into the issue and has requested multiple responses from Rogers on the cause of the outage by July 22.