Rogers Communications said Saturday that its services were almost all back up and running after a big outage that it said was caused by a broken router after maintenance.
Millions of individuals lost banking, transportation, and government access due to a telecom outage.
Rogers (NYSE:ROG) CEO Tony Staffieri said a network system breakdown led to certain routers malfunctioning early Friday morning.
Canadians flocked to internet-accessible cafes, libraries, and hotels on Friday. The border agency’s mobile app for arriving travellers was disrupted, as were cashless payment systems. Some Canadians couldn’t access 911 emergency services, police said.
Rogers’ second outage in 15 months made Canadians angry and led them to call for more telecom competition.
Rogers is the main provider in Ontario, Canada’s most populated province and home to Toronto. Rogers, BCE, and Telus control 90% of the Canadian market.
Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Montreal (NYSE:BMO) stated that the disruption interrupted their services. RBC ATMs and online banking were down.
Staffieri said the company would “proactively” credit Friday customers and put money into its network and infrastructure.
Rogers blamed a big outage on an Ericsson software upgrade last year.
Ericsson stated it was aware of the interruption and was working to restore service.
Critics said the outage showed the need for more telecom competition, adding to criticism of the company’s dominance.
Canada’s competition bureau banned Rogers’ C $20 billion bid to buy competitor Shaw Communications (NYSE: SJR), saying it would hurt competition in a country with high communications costs. undecided on the merger.
