TORONTO-
Canada’s industry minister will convene a meeting with the head of Rogers Communications following a massive outage that crippled the company’s network and hampered several crucial services, his office said on Sunday, even as some customers continued to report service outages.
A statement released by François-Philippe Champagne’s office says he plans to meet with Tony Staffieri and other telecommunications executives to discuss the importance of improving “network reliability across Canada.”
The statement said Champagne found last week’s widespread disruption of services – which lasted at least 15 hours and cut off access to many law enforcement, healthcare and banking services – ” unacceptable,” adding that he expressed that view directly to Staffieri.
“These services are vitally important to Canadians in their daily lives and we expect our telecommunications industry to meet the highest standards that Canadians rightly deserve,” the statement said.
Staffieri released a statement on Saturday attributing Friday’s widespread outage to a network system failure following a maintenance update, adding that the “vast majority” of customers were back online.
But many continued to report service disruptions through Sunday, including in Courtice, Ont. resident Paul Platt, who said his home wireless network was only restored after more than 48 hours.
Platt said many devices in his home, including some lights, locks and smoke detectors, rely on an internet connection to work.
“Nothing was working at all in my house,” he said.
Platt said he checked on his elderly neighbors – one with Parkinson’s disease and the other who had recently had heart surgery – every few hours over the weekend, noting that they also relied on the Rogers service and could not call 911 if necessary.
“That’s where it’s wrong,” Platt said.
Platt said he repeatedly tried to contact Rogers through helplines and social media, but was unable to reach any staff.
He said he was frustrated with both Rogers’ lack of communication for customers still affected by the outages and Staffieri’s statement on Saturday in which he said the company’s network and systems were ” almost fully operational”.
“It’s the most frustrating thing for me,” said Platt, who said he’s worked in IT all his life. “I understand that things happen, I understand that they are very complicated. But there is simply no feedback to customers and…no support available for customers who are still having problems.”
Rogers declined to comment on the ongoing outages when asked by The Canadian Press, but referenced Staffieri’s earlier statement in which he said technical teams were continuing to monitor “any remaining intermittent issues.”
The company released a statement later that day, saying he was aware that some customers continued to experience “intermittent challenges with their services”.
“Our technical teams are working to resolve these remaining issues as soon as possible,” the company said in a tweetreiterating the message that service had been restored for the “vast majority” of customers.
Rogers also said he looked forward to the next meeting with Champagne and other industry members.
“Rogers understands the frustration and disruption we have created for Canadians with our network outage, and we are fully committed to finding solutions,” the company said in a statement. “The federal government and Minister Champagne were there throughout the shutdown to offer assistance, which we are grateful for. They are focused on solutions and a plan for the future and so are we.
Downdetector, an outage tracking website, showed the number of people reporting issues with Rogers’ service was significantly higher than usual on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.
There were more than 2,200 outage reports at the site as of 5 p.m. Saturday, up significantly from the baseline of 38 usually seen at the site at that time. Sunday morning newspapers showed 1,479 reports at 8:30 a.m. from a base of 18.
Montreal, Toronto and the neighboring city of Mississauga, Ontario, as well as the Ontario cities of London and Kitchener were among those with the most reports on the website, with the majority of reports related to problems with the Fixed Internet from Rogers.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on July 10, 2022.
With files from Stephanie Taylor in Ottawa