One day after a Rogers blackout, customers woke up to a widespread sservice outages, most Ontarians are back online, but not all.
There is still no service for many in Oshawa, Ontario. today, and local businesses are still trying to get by.
Ben Darrah, owner of Popeyes Supplements, told CTV News Toronto on Saturday that he is still operating his business without being able to access Interac, mobility or internet services.
“We have someone running to TD right now just to get us crazy, silly, so we can give customers the right amount of change,” Darrah said.
“It’s quite difficult, with our POS system down, we can’t check stock, nothing really. We cannot communicate with other stores,” he said.
Another Oshawa resident, in line for an ATM, raised concerns about accessing health care while services are down.
“You can’t even call 9-1-1 if you need to,” he said. “It’s horrible, I just had a daughter two weeks ago, God forbid something happened to her and we couldn’t communicate with anyone.”
WHAT CAUSED ROGERS’ INTERRUPTION?
On Saturday, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri offered Canadians an apology and an explanation.
“We have narrowed the cause down to a network system failure following a maintenance update we did Thursday night, early Friday morning,” Staffieri said in a statement.
“That update caused some of the routers in our system to malfunction and that malfunction caused an overload of traffic. And as a result of that, the whole system just shuts down,” he continued.
Rogers’ former CEO, Toronto Mayor John Tory, remains a member of the Rogers family trust.
“The people at Rogers are looking into this because I’m sure they’re very careful to see what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Tory said Friday.
WHAT IMPACTED THE ROGERS CUT?
The city’s BikeShare system is powered by Rogers and was completely down for the day, along with the Green-P parking system and Metrolinx ticketing system.
Scarborough Health Network was forced to ask all on-call staff to report to work once they learned of the blackout, as they had no way of contacting staff if needed.
Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children said the outage caused disruptions to its virtual appointment system, stating that affected patients would be contacted to reschedule appointments.
Toronto concert venues urged patrons to print physical copies of tickets because many virtual ticket-reading apps are down due to the outage. The Weeknd’s concert in Toronto on Friday night had to be rescheduled.
Several Ontario police departments were also affected by the outage, with many Ontario customers unable to dial 911.
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) said that some travelers have had problems submitting their travel documents through the ArriveCAN app. Travelers were advised to provide paper copies of their proof of vaccination and travel details via the traveler contact information form.
In April 2021, Rogers experienced a nationwide blackout which saw many unable to make calls, send text messages or access their internet browsers. The communications company attributed this outage to a software problem.