A general view of the Rogers Building, Rogers Communications quarters in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 22, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio
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July 9 (Reuters) – Rogers Communications ( RCIb.TO ) said on Saturday its services were almost fully operational after a massive outage caused by a router malfunction following maintenance work.
An outage at one of Canada’s largest telecommunications carriers shut down banking, transportation and government access for millions of people.
“We now believe we have narrowed down the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update on our core network that caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,” Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said in a statement.
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Canadians flocked to coffee shops and public libraries that still had Internet access and huddled outside hotels to catch a signal on Friday. The country’s border services agency said the outage affected its mobile app for arriving passengers, while cashless payment systems stopped working. Police in Canada said some callers were unable to reach emergency services through 911 calls. Read more
The outage, Rogers’ second in 15 months, has sparked anger among Canadians and calls for the government to expand competition in the telecommunications sector.
With approximately 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail Internet subscribers, Rogers is the top provider in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and home to the largest city, Toronto. Rogers, BCE Inc ( BCE.TO ) and Telus Corp ( T.TO ) control 90 percent of the market share in Canada.
Financial institutions and banks, including Toronto-Dominion Bank ( TD.TO ) and Bank Of Montreal ( BMO.TO ), said on Friday that the outage had disrupted their services. Royal Bank of Canada ( RY.TO ) said its ATMs and online banking services were affected.
In the statement, Staffieri said the company will “proactively” credit customers affected on Friday and invest in its network and technology.
Last year, Rogers attributed a major outage to a bug related to an Ericsson ( ERICb.ST ) software upgrade.
Ericsson said on Saturday it was aware of the outage and was in regular communication with the company to restore service.
Critics said the outage showed the need for more competition in telecommunications, adding to criticism of the company’s industry dominance.
Earlier this year, Canada’s competition bureau blocked Rogers’ attempt to take over rival Shaw Communications ( SJRb.TO ) in a C$20 billion deal, saying it would hinder competition in a country where telecommunications prices are among the highest – the tallest in the world. The merger is still awaiting a final ruling. Read more
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Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm; Editing by Alison Williams, Diane Craft and Chris Rees
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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