Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri and the Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Francois-Phillipe Champagne met to discuss this past Friday’s outage, according to BNN Bloomberg.
For those who are unaware, this past Friday Rogers’ network experienced an outage that affected millions of customers, Interac services, e-transfers and more.
Following the meeting, Minister Champagne posted on Twitter and held a virtual conference discussing some of the outcomes of the conversation. Minister Champagne said he has given carriers 60 days to consider emergency roaming, mutual assistance during outages and building a better communication protocol to inform the public and authorities during telecommunication emergencies.
This is just a first step. 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.
— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) 🇨🇦 (@FP_Champagne) July 11, 2022
That’s why today I brought together the heads of the major telecom companies to demand they take immediate action to improve the resiliency and reliability of our networks by ensuring a formal arrangement is in place within 60 days.
— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) 🇨🇦 (@FP_Champagne) July 11, 2022
The meeting included Rogers CEO Staffieri and Minister Champagne alongside executives from other major telecom companies. The group discussed “…how important it is to improve the reliability of the networks across Canada,” according to the report. Additionally, Champagne said the network failure was “unacceptable.”
Alongside Rogers customers, the outage also caused postponements of events like the Weeknd’s concert, and outages with the Canadian Blood Services website and app, Service Canada’s website and the ArriveCAN app.
My statement on the current Rogers outage: pic.twitter.com/2OYQlH5SCf
— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) 🇨🇦 (@FP_Champagne) July 8, 2022
Rogers is in the process of acquiring Shaw Communications for $26 billion. Minister Campagne, alongside the Competition Bureau, are already opposed to the deal, as it might raise prices.
Rogers says the outage was caused by a maintenance update.
“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.”
Seventeen hours after the outage, Rogers said that it restored service “for the vast majority” of customers, but noted that some may “experience a delay in regaining full service.”
Source: @FP_Champagne, BNN Bloomberg
