Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said “nearly close to 100 percent” of the company’s network is back online following widespread outages on Friday, which he blamed on a network failure after a maintenance update. .
“One hundred percent of our wireless customers have service across the country. And in terms of our cable, both home and business, less than one percent still have what we would describe as intermittent problems,” Staffieri said in an interview with CTV. New channel on. “But our teams are working on it and we hope to have it resolved within an hour.”
The company said late Friday that services were “starting to pick up.” In a statement Friday night, Staffieri said the company had made “significant progress in bringing our networks back online” and apologized for the interruption of service.
Staffieri told CTV News Channel that the cause of Friday’s outage was a “network system failure” following a maintenance update performed between Thursday night and Friday morning.
The network outage affected various mobile and internet services, banks, debit purchases, passport offices and Canada’s ArriveCAN app.
“Usually these are very routine updates to our core network. That update caused some of the routers in our system to malfunction and that malfunction caused an overload of traffic. And as a result, the entire system just went down and the network was rendered inoperable to our customers,” he said.
After the problem was identified, Staffieri said technicians replaced the problematic software, equipment and network settings.
“We worked on it all day yesterday and all night to make those changes so that we can move as quickly as possible to get the network up and running,” Staffieri said.
Rogers says it will automatically credit customers to make up for lost service. Staffieri says the company will also invest in building redundancy and resiliency in its network to prevent future outages.
“We’re proactively applying bill credits for those customers, but more importantly, we’re making sure that we’re putting the money back into the things that they need to make sure they have that resiliency and redundancy in the network to that they can trust and we can earn their trust back in the Rogers network,” he said.
On Saturday morning, Rogers announced services had been restored to “the vast majority” of its customers and said its technical teams were working to ensure remaining affected customers are back online as quickly as possible.
However, the company said some customers may experience delays in regaining full service as traffic volumes return to normal.
Interac said on Saturday morning Electronic transfer and debit services were restored. The payment network also said it would add another carrier to “strengthen the redundancy of our existing network” following the Rogers outage.
Multiple police forces say 911 services can take calls again and the city of Montreal says its 311 tip line is back up and running.
in Ontario, GO Transit and Metrolinx reported its online payment and electronic ticketing systems were back online on Saturday morning.
This is not the first time the Rogers network has experienced a service outage across Canada. In April 2021, there was a nearly day-long outage affecting wireless customers. The company attributed that outage to a problem stemming from a software update.
With archives from The Canadian Press, Melissa Lopez-Martinez and Michael Lee of CTVNews.ca