Network outage due to system failure: Canada telecom firm

While there had been some speculation that the nationwide outage could have been due to cyberattacks, this has been refuted by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendocino

TORONTO: The major telecommunications outage impacting over 10 million Canadians and several services, including government agencies, was due to a network system failure and had no link to a cyberattack.

People crowd around a coffee shop in Toronto, Ontario to use its free wifi on the Bell network, during a major outage of Rogers Communications' mobile and internet networks which caused widespread disruptions across Canada on Friday. (REUTERS)

Rogers Communications, the company which saw its services fail early on Friday morning and remain disrupted for nearly 24 hours, issued a statement on Saturday stating the “network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning.”

While there had been some speculation that the nationwide outage could have been due to cyberattacks, this has been refuted by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendocino.

In a statement, Rogers president and CEO Tony Staffieri said, “We know how much our customers rely on our networks and I sincerely apologise. We’re particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority.”

Rogers accounts for nearly a third of Canada’s telecom service landscape. It along with two other majors, Bell Canada Enterprises and Telus Communications, dominate the telecom sector in Canada, with close to 90% market share. The outage on Friday has led to critics of this situation to call for greater competition in the sector.

The countrywide outage of the Rogers network, that began at around 4.30am Eastern time on Friday, impacted not just users of mobile phones or home or business Internet subscribers, but also threw some government services offline. Transit, schools, hospitals, debit payments were among the areas adversely affected.

It could lead to scrutiny in Canada’s parliament, as MPs have called for such action, and also at the national level, as Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne tweeted on Friday that this “unacceptable situation is why quality, diversity & reliability are key to our telecom network”.