Rogers services are back online for most customers after a daylong outage at the telecom giant that left millions of Canadians without internet and cellular service, while also disrupting government services and payment systems.
Some individual users saw their internet connections and cellphones come back to life Friday evening, and an update sent to CBC's IT department said the problem in Rogers's "core network … looks to have recovered."
In an
update Saturday morning, posted to Twitter, Rogers said it has now restored services for the "vast majority of our customers" and that its technical teams are working hard to ensure that the remaining customers are back online as quickly as possible.
The Toronto-based company has offered no timeline for when service may be restored to all customers.
Tony Staffieri, chief executive and president of Rogers, said in an open letter that the company apologizes for the service interruption. He gave no explanation for the outage or how many customers were affected.
The outage began some time early Friday morning; throughout the day the company said little about its cause or when it might end.
"We don't understand how the different levels of redundancy that we build across the network coast to coast have not worked," said Kye Prigg, Rogers' senior vice-president of access networks and operations, on CBC's
Power & Politics.
"We are working very, very hard on making sure that we get everything running as soon as possible," he told host Catherine Cullen.
The company has approximately nine million wireless customers and just shy of three million on the cable and internet side of the business.
Responding to questions about compensation, Rogers said earlier that it would be "proactively crediting all customers" — but did not provide further details.
There is "no indication" the outage is due to a cyberattack, according to a statement from Canada's electronic spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment.
The U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Cloudflare agreed with that assessment, saying in a
in a blog post that the outage was likely "an internal error."
Whatever the reason, the impact has been dramatic. Internet monitoring watchdog group Netblocks.org reported that
total internet traffic in Canada was at 75 per cent of its normal level on Friday morning.
Rogers-owned flanker brands like Fido and Chatr also went offline, as did services not directly controlled by Rogers, such as emergency services, travel and financial networks.
