Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said “pretty close to 100 percent” of the company’s network was back online after widespread outages on Friday, which he attributed to a network failure following a maintenance update.
“One hundred percent of our wireless customers have nationwide service. And in terms of our cable, both at home and at business, less than one percent still have what we would describe as intermittent problems,” Staffieri said in an interview with CTV’s New Channel On. “But our teams are working on it and we hope to resolve this within the hour.”
The company said Friday evening that services were “beginning to be restored.” In a statement late Friday night, Staffieri said the company had made “significant progress toward bringing our networks back online” and apologized for the service outage.
Staffieri told CTV News Channel that the cause of Friday’s outage was “failure in the network system” following a maintenance update that took place between late Thursday night and early Friday morning.
The network outage affected several mobile and internet services, banks, debit purchases, passport services and Canada’s ArriveCAN app.
“These are usually very routine updates to our core network. This update caused some of the routers in our system to malfunction and this malfunction caused traffic congestion. And as a result, the whole system just shuts down and the network becomes down for our customers,” he said.
Once the problem was identified, Staffieri said technicians replaced the problematic software, equipment and network configuration.
“We’ve been working on this all day yesterday and into the night to make these changes so we can act 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 resilience in its network to prevent future outages.
“We’re proactively applying account credits for those customers, but more importantly we’re making sure we’re putting the money back into investing in the things they need to make sure they have that resilience and redundancy in the network, so that they can count on and we can earn their trust back in the Rogers network,” he said.
On Saturday morning, Rogers announced that services had been restored to the “vast majority” of its customers and said its technical teams were working to ensure the remaining affected customers were back online as quickly as possible.
However, the company said some customers may experience delays in restoring full service as traffic volumes return to normal.
Interac said Saturday morning that electronic transfer and debit services had been restored. The payments network also said it would add another provider to “strengthen existing network redundancy” following the Rogers outage.
Multiple police forces say 911 services can take calls again, and the city of Montreal says the 311 information line is back up and running.
In Ontario, GO Transit and Metrolinx said their e-ticketing and online payment systems were back online Saturday morning.
This isn’t the first time Rogers’ network has experienced service outages across Canada. In April 2021, there was an almost day-long outage that affected wireless customers. The company attributed this outage to a problem stemming from a software update.
With files from The Canadian Press, Melissa Lopez-Martinez and CTVNews.ca’s Michael Lee
Following our previous updates, we have now restored services to the vast majority of our customers and our technical teams are working hard to ensure that the remaining customers are back online as quickly as possible. pic.twitter.com/IobL7Dze6i
— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) July 9, 2022
Since Rogers has restored connectivity after their entire system was down, INTERAC services are now fully available. If you have any questions about a specific INTERAC e-Transfer or INTERAC Debit transaction, please contact your financial institution directly.
— INTERAC (@INTERAC) July 9, 2022
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