Rogers has restored service to the “vast majority” of customers following a significant outage.
Connectivity started to return early Saturday morning.
Following a severe outage that knocked out internet, mobile, and home phone services on Friday, Rogers Communications claims it has restored access to the “vast majority” of customers. Rogers stated on Twitter on Saturday morning that some customers “may notice a delay in recovering full service” while the company works to bring everyone back online.
The outage began at 5 a.m. ET on Friday and lasted throughout the day and far into the evening. NetBlocks, an internet disruption tracker, discovered that the outage knocked off almost a fifth of Canada’s access at the time.
Following our previous updates, we have now restored services for the vast majority of our customers and our technical teams are working hard to ensure that the remaining customers are back online as quickly as possible. pic.twitter.com/IobL7Dze6i
— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) July 9, 2022
According to CBC, Rogers has around 9 million mobile users and serves roughly 3 million people with cable and internet. In addition to hurting clients of Rogers’ mobile subsidiaries, Fido and Chatr, it also disrupted a variety of critical services across the country, including 911 calls, debit card transactions, ATMs, and government organizations such as Canada’s passport offices and Revenue Agency.
According to a graphic supplied by NetBlocks that shows real-time internet traffic statistics in Canada, Rogers began to restore service at approximately 12AM ET Saturday morning. Data from Cloudflare, a business that specializes in content delivery and DDoS mitigation, shows a similar trend, with internet traffic picking up again about midnight and returning to near-normal levels.
Interac, one of the impacted financial networks, has declared that its services are now operational. The corporation supports a vast number of debit cards, ATMs, and electronic cash transfers across Canada, with Interac recently announcing that the service has achieved one billion transactions. Interac wants to “additionally reinforce” its “current network redundancy” to assist avoid its services from going offline in the event of another outage.
Rogers has not yet offered an explanation for the outage, but the Canadian Communications Security Establishment says there is “no sign” of a hack, according to the CBC. Cloudflare experts also stated that the outage was most likely caused by “an internal fault, not a cyber assault.” They believe it was caused by a problem with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a technology that governs the flow of traffic on the internet. BGP was also involved in an outage that disrupted Facebook’s services last year.
“Once again, we deeply regret the inconvenience this has caused our consumers, and we will reimburse all clients proactively,” Rogers stated. “You do not need to contact us for the credit because it will be credited to your account immediately.”