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Rogers Execs To Testify In House of Commons About Mass Outage

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Two hearings will be held to hold Rogers Communications accountable for the outage that affected Canadians coast to coast.

For more than 15 hours, Rogers (Fido and Chatr) networks of cellphones, internet and more were down. Even stretching to interfering with debit transactions, but most dangerously was the inaccessibility of emergency services.

Some emergency services switched to an email, which is an alternative– however, without online access how do you compose and email in the event of an emergency?

That being a major concern for the CRTC as it outlined 54 questions to Rogers to provide more information;

  • what was the root cause of the outage (including what processes, procedures or safeguards failed to prevent the outage, such as planned redundancy or patch upgrade validation procedures)
  • total number of people impacted by the outage, personal & business related.
  • how were 9-1-1 calls processed during the outage and whether they were able to be processed by other wireless networks within the same coverage area

These are just an example of some of the questions posed to the telecommunications company. An abridged version of Rogers response is can be read here.

Almost immediately after the outage, Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne directed all the major wireless providers to come to a mutual agreement on how they would transfer customers to another network in the event of another outage.

However, during its downtime this idea was brought up but Rogers didn’t believe that the competition’s networks could withstand a sudden influx of traffic if they just flipped a switch and moved over 10 million accounts over.

During the hearings schedule for Monday, July 25 2022, executives from Rogers as well as CRTC officials and the Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne will be in attendance.

Shortly after connections were restored, Rogers and it’s subsidiaries announced they would be crediting accounts for five billing days. This despite a class-action lawsuit that was filed in Quebec seeking $400 for each customer affected by the outage.

Rogers did announce that they will be separating its wireless and internet services to create an “always on” network so that if cellphones go down, Wi-Fi will stay up and vice versa. Executives have also stated that they are working with their counter parts on agreements that would allow customers to switch to another network for the sake of making emergency calls.

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Ottawa Demands Immediate Action After Rogers Outage

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Canada’s industry minister is demanding immediate action from the country’s telecom companies after last week’s Rogers outage.

François-Philippe Champagne met with the heads of Rogers, Bell and Telus on Monday to discuss ways to improve the resiliency of the network across Canada.

“I told them in essence that this was unacceptable. Full stop,” Champagne said of the nationwide outage that affected millions of Canadians.

Champagne said the companies must enter into a formal arrangement within 60 days to cover three areas of concern.

They include mutual assistance during outages, emergency roaming, and a communication protocol to better inform the public and authorities during telecommunications emergencies.

Champagne said the agreement is similar to what the FCC in the United States has enacted to improve network resiliency during disasters.

“All these measures taken together will add resilience to our network and make sure we are better prepared if anything similar were to happen again,” he said.

Champagne said these initial steps will be in addition to any recommendations that come from the CRTC inquiry that will investigate the root cause of the outage.

Over the weekend, Rogers said it believes the outage was caused by a network system failure in one of its core networks following a maintenance update which caused some of its routers to malfunction.