Canadian telecom giant Rogers Communications says it has restored connectivity to the “vast majority” of customers following
a major outage that took down its internet, mobile, and home phone services on Friday. In
an update posted to Twitter on Saturday morning, Rogers explained that some customers “may experience a delay in regaining full service” as it works to get everyone back online.
Tony Staffieri, the president and CEO of Rogers,
wrote a message to customers Saturday afternoon, announcing that services “have been restored” and that its network and systems “are close to fully operational.” Staffieri attributes the outage to a “network system failure following a maintenance update” that caused an issue with the company’s routers.
“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,” Staffieri adds.
This appears to confirm
speculation from the experts at Cloudflare, a company that specializes in content delivery and DDoS mitigation. At the time of the outage, they believed that it may have been caused by an issue with
the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a system that controls the flow of traffic on the internet. BGP
also played a role in an
outage that brought down Facebook’s services last year.
The outage began as early as Friday at 5AM ET, lingering throughout the entirety of the day and well into the evening. At the time of the outage, internet disruption tracker
NetBlocks found that it brought down about a quarter of Canada’s connectivity.
According to CBC, Rogers has about 9 million mobile customers and provides cable and internet to nearly 3 million people. In addition to affecting customers of Rogers’ mobile subsidiaries, Fido and Chatr, it also unplugged a range of essential services throughout the country, interfering
with 911 calls,
debit card transactions, ATMs, and government agencies including
Canada’s passport offices and
Revenue Agency.
