Rogers continues to monitor the situation, is aware of ongoing issues for some customers
TORONTO – Over the weekend Rogers Communications continued to make progress on getting its networks fully operational and explained what caused the nationwide outage on Friday.
“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,” reads a letter from Rogers president and CEO Tony Staffieri, which was posted on the company’s website on Saturday.
“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.”
The letter also notes Rogers’ networks and systems are “close” to being fully operational. “Our technical teams are continuing to monitor for any remaining intermittent issues,” Staffieri wrote.
As of this afternoon, Rogers is “continuing to monitor closely to ensure stability across our network as traffic returns to normal,” a spokesperson told Cartt.ca via email. “While our networks and systems are close to fully operational, and the vast majority of customers have had their service restored, we are aware that some customers continue to experience intermittent challenges with their services. Our technical teams are working to resolve these remaining issues as quickly as possible.”
Independent service providers impacted by the outage have indicated some of their customers have continued to experience issues past Friday. TekSavvy said on Twitter yesterday, “While some customers are online or intermittent, we are fully aware that most are not. We are still working hard on having the issue resolved for all of our customers. We truly appreciate your patience and understanding while we work through this with you.” Today the company noted in response to a question on Twitter “All known issues have been clear.”
Execulink posted on Twitter today to say that while another issue was resolved on Sunday and they believe most of the problems their customers were facing have been resolved, they are aware some are continuing to experience “slow speeds or intermittent service disruptions as a result of the outage.”
What happens now?
Rogers “will proactively credit all customers automatically,” according to the letter from Staffieri. As of Saturday, the company was also “continuing to dig deep into the root cause and identify steps to increase redundancy in our networks and systems.”
For the government’s part, the minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne called a meeting of telecom executives, which will take place today.
“The minister has been emphatic that the situation is unacceptable and expressed that directly to the CEO of Rogers,” reads a statement from the minister’s office. “These services are vitally important for Canadians in their day to day life and we expect our telecom industry to meet the highest standards that Canadians rightly deserve.”
The statement indicates the meeting will involve a discussion of “how important it is to improve the reliability of the networks across Canada.”
According to The Globe and Mail, the other telecoms invited to the meeting include Bell, Telus, Shaw, Videotron, SaskTel and Eastlink. We will have more on this later today as the minister is scheduled to hold a media availability on the matter at 4:30 p.m. ET.
While the outage has been a nightmare for many, as the advertisement pictured below shows, at least one telecom took it as an opportunity to convince people to switch service providers.
