Nationwide Rogers outage ‘a little unnerving’

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This article was published 11/07/2022 (1324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A widespread Rogers Communications Inc. outage caused trouble for 911 services, retailers and transit operators across Canada Friday.

Donalda Garner was heading from Regina to Brandon for her sister’s funeral when the outage hit. It was already a stressful day as she knew she was on a tight deadline to get to Brandon.

She had her day carefully planned out with errands to run in preparation for her journey when she encountered the abrupt chaos of not being able to use her debit card to pay for something as simple as gas.

“No place was working,” Garner said. “It’s such an extreme feeling — it’s like losing your wallet.”

She quickly returned to Regina to visit her bank branch and pick up some cash. When she arrived at her bank, the lineup of customers stretched around the outside of the building.

“It was unbelievable,” Garner said. “Everybody was nattering about the exact same thing — it was quite a little turmoil. You don’t realize how much you depend on a card like that. I think from now on I’ll be a little more cautious and keep some cash on hand at home … you have to change your entire mode of thinking.”

The Canadian Press reported the widespread disruption created by the massive network outage shut down mobile and Internet services across Canada. It marked Rogers’ second significant outage in 15 months.

The outage began early Friday morning and paralyzed communications across sectors including health care, law enforcement and the financial industry. Many 911 services could not receive incoming calls, several hospitals reported impacts to their services, and debit transactions were paused when Interac was knocked offline.

Rogers chief executive officer Tony Staffieri issued a statement on Saturday afternoon saying service had been restored and the company’s “networks and systems are close to fully operational.”

He said the company is continuing to monitor its network for problems and investigate the root cause of the issues.

“We now believe we’ve narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,” he said.

Staffieri apologized for the outage.

CRTC spokeswoman Patricia Valladao said the telecom regulator is in contact with Rogers.

“Right now, our focus is on the outage and recovering from it,” she wrote in an email to The Canadian Press. “When it is over, we will take all necessary actions to examine what occurred and put in place the necessary measures to prevent it from happening again.”

According to Netblocks, a United Kingdom-based organization that monitors cybersecurity, the outage knocked out around 25 per cent of Canada’s observable internet connectivity at its peak.

Rogers said it will proactively credit customers for the outage, but provided no details about the amount. The company said it is aware of spam text messages claiming to offer the credit and noted customers would be credited automatically.

The Brandon Sun conducted an informal poll in the Shoppers Mall parking lot Saturday to find out how Brandonites were impacted by the Rogers outage.

Emma Monias, a Telus client, said the greatest challenge during the outage proved to be running errands as all the Interac machines she encountered were down.

“It was a bit of chaos,” Monias said. “I needed milk for my coffee and I had to run to the store about three different times because I don’t carry cash. It was a little frustrating but it was nice once I had my cup of coffee.”

The incident has her planning on leaving cash aside in case something like this happens again.

Lawyer Andrew Synyshyn woke up to no cell service in a job where mobile phones are critical. His law firm exclusively uses Rogers for its mobile phones, and the mobiles are critical for daily workflow.

“It’s the cost of doing business. Life happens. It’s kind of nice not to be in contact sometimes, so I won’t say it was all a bad thing.”

Synyshyn was in court at the time of the outage and his other associate was in Virden. They were unable to communicate even via text or email.

“We had to do the old-fashioned way and go back to the office and make a phone call from a landline or use the internet to send an email,” Synyshyn said. “We couldn’t check anything while it was all down. Communication was difficult.”

He added he is an on-call lawyer for when people are arrested, meaning clients were potentially unable to contact their lawyers.

“It definitely could have caused problems if people were trying to get a hold of us,” Synyshyn said.

He does not see the outage changing workflow practices or planning for his daily life because it is not a common occurrence.

“There’s not much I can do. Everything we do, if it’s wireless and it’s using data, then we completely rely on whatever provider we have,” Synyshyn said. “If we knew it was going to be gone for a while, then we would probably just plan a bit better.”

Michelle Dryden was unable to communicate with her parents or children who were camping during the outage.

“They [my children] were camping out in Treherne with grandma and grandpa and I was trying to get a hold of them because either I drive there or they come here and I couldn’t get a hold of them,” Dryden said.

They waited in town trying to decide what to do and her parents ended up coming to Brandon. Dryden’s parents told her they were carefully scanning the cars they passed to ensure they didn’t see their daughter headed in the opposite direction.

“It’s a little bit unnerving that they were on the highway and no 911 service was available to them if they got in an accident with the kids,” Dryden said.

» ckemp@brandonsun.com, with files from The Canadian Press

» Twitter: @The_ChelseaKemp