Rogers CEO apologizes, says ‘maintenance upgrade’ behind major outage

President and CEO of Rogers Communications apologized for the severe outage that disrupted service to more than 10 million Canadians. “Network failure” was due to maintenance upgrades, he said.

In an interview with Global News, Tony Staffieri said there was “a maintenance upgrade in our core network and that caused our router to malfunction.”

As a result, some “routers flooded the network with traffic the wrong way”.

Staffieri said the group had come to the conclusion that this sequence of events had caused the major loss of life after deploying “hundreds and thousands” of people to address the issue, including some from “all over the world”. places in the world”.

He confirmed the outage affected more than 10 million customers.

2:05
Toronto’s The Weeknd was forced to cancel a concert in his hometown due to Rogers’ shutdown

The outage, which lasted through most of Friday, affected mobile and internet services across Canada, shutting down key sectors from banking to government services.

Rogers didn’t acknowledge the issue until just before 9 a.m. ET on Friday morning, leaving users in the dark for hours.

Nearly a day later, at 7 a.m. ET on Saturday, a spokesperson confirmed to Global News that wireless services had been “restored” for “the majority” of Rogers customers.

“As our services come back online and traffic returns to normal, some customers may experience delays in getting back to full service,” the spokesperson added.

Staffieri said identifying the problem and then working to fix it is a complex task.

“You can imagine the complexity of some of these changes being made, they involve a lot of software, a lot of hardware in our network,” he said. “They dug into that to try to understand specifically what changes caused the outage, and then how do we actually get the network back up and running.”

2:34
A day of disappointment for millions of Canadians following a nationwide loss of life at Rogers Communications

Rogers has promised to proactively compensate customers. Staffieri says the compensation will be considered a two-day credit on the customer’s next bill for service they did not receive.

A spokesman for the Office of Public Safety Secretary Marco Mendicino previously confirmed to Global News that the outage was not due to a cyberattack.

“We are now going through what I call a more detailed and rigorous root cause analysis process of what happened,” says Staffieri. “And that will continue in the hours and days to come.”

– With files from Global News ‘Brittany Rosen, Rachel Gilmore and Sean Boynton