Canada Grills Telecom Execs Over Disruption

The Canadian federal industry minister said Sunday (Monday, July 11, 2022, in Manila) he is summoning telecom executives following an outage at Rogers Communications Inc. that disrupted mobile and Internet services across Canada, Reuters reported.

Photo Insert: The Rogers headquarters

In a statement, Francois-Philippe Champagne said he would meet with Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri and other telecom executives to discuss improving "the reliability of networks across Canada."

He called the failure "unacceptable."

The massive outage, which began Friday morning and lasted at least 15 hours, crippled communications across industries such as health care, law enforcement, and finance. Many 911 systems were unable to accept incoming calls, numerous hospitals reported service disruptions, and debit card transactions were halted.

Staffieri issued an apology message on Saturday for the disruption. According to Netblocks, a British-based cybersecurity monitoring group, the outage knocked off around 25% of Canada's observed Internet connectivity at its peak.

“We know how much our customers rely on our networks and I sincerely apologize,” he said.

“We’re particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority.” Staffieri said services had been restored and were close to fully operational.

“We now believe we’ve narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,” Staffieri said. Many customers continued reporting service disruptions into Sunday.

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