TORONTO — The chief executive of Rogers Communications is sharing some details about the massive outage that paralyzed mobile and internet services across much of Canada for at least 15 hours.
Tony Staffieri said in a statement that the disruption was caused by a network system failure following a maintenance update in the telecom giant’s core network, which caused some routers to malfunction early Friday morning.
Staffieri apologized for the resulting outage that paralyzed services in sectors ranging from law enforcement to the financial industry, saying Rogers let customers down and has developed an action plan to restore trust.
He also says the company plans to credit customer accounts as compensation, but offered no other details.
Businesses and government agencies say they’ve largely restored service that went offline during the outage.
Multiple police forces say 911 services are able to receive calls again, Interac says debit transactions have resumed, and the Correctional Service of Canada says telecom services are back up and running at several parole offices and an Ontario prison. The city of Montreal has also reopened its 311 line, while Toronto’s Scarborough Health Network, which had asked on-call staff and doctors to come in at the height of Friday’s outage, says its communications services have now been restored.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 9, 2022.
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