The massive outage, which began Friday morning and lasted at least 15 hours, crippled communications across industries such as health care, law enforcement, and finance. Following an outage at Rogers Communications Inc. that interrupted mobile and Internet services across Canada, the federal industry minister said on Sunday that he is summoning telecom executives.
In a statement, Francois-Philippe Champagne said he will meet with Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri and other telecom executives to discuss increasing “the stability of networks across Canada.” He described the failure as “unacceptable.”
The massive outage, which began Friday morning and lasted at least 15 hours, crippled communications across industries such as health care, law enforcement, and finance. Many 911 systems were unable to accept incoming calls, numerous hospitals reported service disruptions, and debit card transactions were halted.
Staffieri issued an apology message on Saturday for the disruption.
“We understand how important our networks are to our clients, and I truly apologise,” he added. “We are very concerned that some consumers were unable to access emergency services, and we are resolving the issue as a top priority.”
Staffieri stated that services had been restored and were nearing completion.
“We now believe we’ve pinpointed the reason to a network system breakdown caused by a maintenance upgrade in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,” said Staffieri.
Many users reported service problems on Sunday.
Rogers said in a statement on Sunday that it was aware that some customers were still experiencing “intermittent problems with their services.”
According to Richard Leblanc, a governance, law, and ethics professor at York University in Toronto, the outage demonstrated how susceptible Canadian business, financial institutions, and health-care systems are to a telecom provider assault.
“This might have been disastrous for the country if this was a threat actor,” he stated over the phone.
It was Rogers’ second severe outage in 15 months.
According to Netblocks, a British-based cybersecurity monitoring group, the outage knocked off around 25% of Canada’s observed Internet access at its height.
