Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission ordered the company to give answers in a week
Canadian regulators ordered Rogers Communication to provide a more thorough accounting of what happened last weekend to cause a nationwide outage for Canada’s biggest mobile telco. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave the company a week to comply, ordering Rogers to respond to its questions about the outage by July 22, 2022. The CRTC wants Rogers to explain what caused the outage and what specific steps it’s taking to credit customer accounts as a result of the failure. The CRTC also wants to know the extent of Rogers’ emergency services failure during the outage.
Millions of Canadian consumers and many businesses were left without voice or Internet services beginning early Friday, last week. Rogers was able to recover from the outage in stages, though some customers were left without access until well into Saturday evening. The network outage disrupted customers’ ability to make calls and use Internet services and extended well beyond Rogers’ mobile customers — landlines were also affected. The Rogers network outage didn’t just disrupt consumers, either, with businesses and essential services which rely on Rogers’ network disrupted as well. The Rogers outage affected banks, passport offices, Canada’s Interac funds transfer service, even calls to emergency services via 911.
On Saturday, the company’s president and CEO, Tony Staffieri, acknowledged the problems in a blog post on the company’s website. He explained that a maintenance update to Rogers’ core network caused some of its routers to malfunction early on Friday.
“We disconnected the specific equipment and redirected traffic, which allowed our network and services to come back online over time as we managed traffic volumes returning to normal levels,” said Staffieri, who claimed that services were “pretty close to 100 percent” by Saturday afternoon.
Staffieri outlined a three-pronged plan to manage the crisis, starting with full-service restoration, complete root cause analysis and testing, and further changes to the network to improve stability and increase redundancy.
Canada’s tech minister calls Rogers’ outage “unacceptable. Full stop.”
Beyond Staffieri’s post, however, Rogers has been silent on the cause of the outage, raising fresh criticism about the need for increased competition in the famously stagnant and overpriced Canadian telecom industry. Rogers did, on Tuesday, promised to credit customers for five days of service.
François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, took to Twitter to excoriate Rogers for the system failure. He called it “unacceptable. Full stop.” In a series of tweets on Monday, Champagne said he’d called an emergency meeting of Canada’s telecom executives to shore up Canada’s telecom infrastructure within the next 60 days.
“Canadians deserve more from their providers in terms of quality and reliability of service and I will ensure they meet the high standard that Canadians expect, including improving competition, innovation and affordability,” he said.
The news comes as Rogers and broadband service provider Shaw Communications continue to negotiate a merger with Canadian regulators, which they first announced in March 2021. The corporate union has been thwarted repeated by Canadian authorities, who say the consolidation will hurt competition and innovation in the Canadian telecom market.
As part of that plan, Rogers and Shaw wish to spin off Shaw’s Freedom Mobile subsidiary to Quebecor. This move would create a fourth viable Canadian national mobile operator according to the companies ± a move Canadian consumer advocates have agitated for, for years, hoping to break the logjam between Rogers, Bell Canada and Telus. That deal with Quebecor, and the Rogers/Shaw acquisition, remain under heavy scrutiny by the Canadian government more than a year after first being announced, and so far, the government hasn’t yielded.
The July outage is Rogers’ second major event in barely more than a year. In April 2021, the company experienced a service interruption that lasted nearly an entire day. Rogers later attributed the outage to a problem associated with an Ericsson software update.
