Canada’s industry minister will convene a meeting with the leader of Rogers Communications after a massive outage paralyzed the company’s network and disrupted several critical services, his office said Sunday, although some customers continued to report service disruptions.
A statement released by François-Philippe Champagne’s office said he plans to meet with Tony Staffieri and other telecommunications leaders to discuss the importance of improving “the reliability of Canada’s networks.”
The statement said Champagne found last week’s widespread service outage — which lasted at least 15 hours and disrupted access to numerous law enforcement, health and banking services — “unacceptable,” adding that he had expressed that view directly to Staffieri .
“These services are vital to Canadians in their daily lives, and we expect our telecommunications industry to meet the highest standards that Canadians rightfully deserve,” the statement said.
Staffieri released a statement on Saturday attributing Friday’s massive outage to a network system failure following a maintenance update, adding that the “vast majority” of customers were back online.
Meanwhile, a consumer group has made a formal request to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to investigate the outage.
Center for Public Interest Advocacy Executive Director John Lawford said the CRTC will be able to obtain information and documents from Rogers that the public does not have access to and make recommendations to Rogers on how to prevent future outages.
WATCH | Consumer group asks telecoms watchdog to inquire into Rogers outage:
Consumer group asks telecoms watchdog for inquiry into Rogers outage
John Lawford, executive director of the Center for Public Interest Advocacy, has asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to conduct an investigation into the nationwide Rogers outage and set new rules for all telecommunications providers.
“Having it happen during apparently routine maintenance makes this very suspicious, because you would want to hope that they would do their maintenance in a way that wouldn’t put the entire network at risk,” Lawford told CBC News Network on Sunday.
His organization also asked the CRTC to consider new regulatory responsibilities for all telecommunications providers regarding their communications with customers, indemnification requirements and ensuring continued access to the 911 system in the event of an outage.
“Wouldn’t it be great if the companies, at the end of this, got a road map from the CRTC that says if you have an outage, you have the right to borrow some of the capacity of another network to continue essential services during the outage?” Lawford said.
The outages continue
Many customers continued to report service outages into Sunday, including Paul Platt, a resident of Curtis, Ont., who said his home wireless network was restored only after it was down for more than 48 hours.
Platt said many of the appliances in his home, including some lights, locks and smoke detectors, depend on an Internet connection to function.
“Nothing was working in my house at all,” he said.
Platt said he checked on his elderly neighbors — one with Parkinson’s disease and another who recently had heart surgery — every few hours over the weekend, noting that they also rely on Rogers service and won’t be able to call 911 , if necessary.
“That’s where this is wrong,” he said.
Platt said he made numerous attempts to contact Rogers through support lines and social media, but was unable to reach any staff.
WATCH | Rogers reacts to a massive network outage:
Rogers CEO apologizes for massive service outage, blames maintenance update
Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri apologized for the extended network outage that affected customers across the country and blamed it on a network system failure following a maintenance update on the core network.
He said he was disappointed both by Rogers’ lack of communication about customers still affected by outages and by Staffieri’s statement Saturday, in which he said the company’s network and systems were “close to being completely working”.
“That’s the most frustrating thing to me,” Platt said, adding that he’s worked in IT all his life. “I understand that things happen, I understand that they are very complicated. But there just isn’t any customer feedback and … there’s no support available for customers who are still having problems.”
Rogers declined to comment on the ongoing outages when asked by The Canadian Press, but referred to Staffieri’s previous statement, in which he said technical teams were continuing to monitor for “any remaining intermittent issues.”
In a statement Saturday, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri, shown in New York in 2017, attributed Friday’s widespread outage to a network system failure following a maintenance update. The statement said the “vast majority” of customers were back online, but many reported service outages on Sunday. (Misha Friedman/Bloomberg)
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the upcoming meeting with Champagne.
Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, showed that the number of people reporting problems with Rogers service was significantly higher than usual on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.
There were more than 2,200 reports of outages on the site at 5pm on Saturday, a significant increase from the baseline of 38 typically seen on the site at that time. Sunday morning logs showed 1,479 reports at 8:30 a.m., compared to a baseline of 18.
Montreal, Toronto and neighboring Mississauga, Ont., as well as the Ontario cities of London and Kitchener, were among those logging the most reports on the website, with the majority of reports related to issues with Rogers’ landline internet.
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