The chairman and CEO of Rogers Communications has apologized for a serious network outage that disrupted service for more than 10 million Canadians. The “network system failure” was caused by a maintenance update, he says.
In an interview with Global News, Tony Staffieri said that there was “a maintenance update on our core network, and that caused our routers to not work properly.”
As a result, some “routers mistakenly flooded the network with traffic.”
Read more:
Rogers says wireless services restored for ‘vast majority’ as blackout drags on
Staffieri said the corporation concluded that this series of events caused the severe network outage after deploying “hundreds and thousands” of people to work on the problem, including some from “around the world.”
He confirmed that the outage affected more than 10 million customers.
The outage, which persisted for most of Friday, affected cellular and internet services across Canada, bringing major sectors from banking to government services to a halt.
Rogers didn’t acknowledge the problem until just before 9 a.m. ET on Friday morning, leaving users in the dark for hours.
Read more:
Rogers disruption sheds light on need for competition in Canada’s telecoms sector: expert
Nearly a full day later, at 7 am ET on Saturday, a spokesperson confirmed to Global News that wireless services had been “restored” to “the vast majority” of Rogers customers.
“As our services come back online and traffic volumes return to normal, some customers may experience a delay in full service recovery,” the spokesperson added.
Staffieri said identifying the problem and then working to fix it was a difficult task.
“You can imagine the complexity of some of these changes that are made, they involve a lot of software, a lot of hardware on our network,” he said. “They went through that to try to understand which of the changes, specifically, caused the outage, and then how we can get the network back.”
Rogers has promised to proactively compensate customers. Staffieri said the compensation will take the form of a two-day credit on the customer’s next bill for the service they didn’t receive.
A spokesperson for the office of Public Security Minister Marco Mendicino previously confirmed to Global News that the outage was not caused by a cyber attack.
“We are now going through what I would call the most rigorous and detailed process of root cause analysis of what happened,” Staffieri said. “And that will continue to unfold in the coming hours and days.”
— Archived by Brittany Rosen, Rachel Gilmore and Sean Boynton of Global News
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.