Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri published another update about Friday’s day-long outage, finally detailing some of what went wrong.
“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,” Staffieri wrote. “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.”
Moreover, Staffieri said he was “troubled” that customers weren’t able to reach emergency service during the outage and said Rogers is addressing the issue “as an urgent priority.”
Finally, Staffieri laid out three pillars of the company’s action plan following the outage. First, the company plans to fully restore all services. Staffieri said this was nearly finished, but the company is still monitoring stability across the network.
Next, Rogers intends to complete analysis and testing of the root cause of the outage. Part of this goal is to increase redundancy in Rogers’ network.
Finally, Rogers will make necessary changes to “increase network stability for our customers, and enhance our testing.”
You can read the CEO’s words in full here.
This is the most information Rogers has provided about the outage so far. Rogers’ network went down early on the morning of July 8th, disrupting wireless and internet services for customers, including Rogers’ flanker brands Fido and Chatr. Moreover, the outage impacted government and financial services, businesses, and even caused several events to be postponed.
Cloudflare previously shared an analysis of Rogers’ network based on internet traffic, suggesting the issue was an internal problem and not the result of a cyberattack. It appears that the analysis was correct.
Rogers also reiterated that it would automatically apply credits to compensate customers for the outage, clarifying that there would be no action required from people to claim the credit. The clarification comes as the company acknowledged ongoing scam messages using the promised credit to target customers.
