The nationwide telecommunications chaos isn’t over for everyone, but most of Rogers’ millions of customers were relieved to be reconnected to the world on Saturday.
Although the telecom giant said the “vast majority” of their customers had their service restored, many were still left without a full connection.
“Yeah, I’m disappointed,” Kanata resident John Hansen said.
His cell service was restored late Friday, but early Saturday, Hansen still had no Internet access.
“I’m glad I had an aerial for the TV so I could at least watch TV that way. It makes you think about what you’re going to do as a backup for the Internet, kind of like when your power goes out.”
As of Saturday morning, Rogers said service had been restored for the “vast majority” of its customers, and the company provided the following explanation for what happened.
“We narrowed down the cause to a network system failure after a maintenance update we did late Thursday night, early Friday morning,” said Rogers President and CEO Tony Staffieri.
“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 entire system simply shut down.
While service was back for many to start the weekend, it didn’t come without challenges.
“Yesterday was a nightmare for sure,” said Ottawa resident Sally Thomas, who was without service Friday.
She said that for people with disabilities like herself, the impact is significant. She couldn’t get through to her maintenance worker and was struggling to book a ride with Para Transpo.
“Thousands of people with disabilities are adversely affected when they can’t contact caregivers, can’t call 911, can’t call Para Transpo, the list goes on.”
The business was also left to clean up the mess. Preston Hardware spent Saturday morning charging for purchases made on Friday.
“Our credit machines weren’t working, the cash registers were working, but cash only, and to make it convenient for our customers, we took down their credit cards and processed them this morning,” said Robbie Ibrahim, store manager.
The outage was an inconvenience for millions and still is for some, but Rogers promises he won’t make the phone call, the company plans to invest more money to prevent it from ever happening again.
“For them to count on and for us to earn their trust back in the Rogers network,” Staffieri said.
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