Rogers Communications’ chief technology officer was out of the country on Friday, July 8, the day of the network outage that affected more than 10 million Canadians and hundreds of thousands of businesses.
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
That day, Jorge Fernandes was in Portugal, according to our information.
Jorge Fernandes has been Chief Technology Officer at Rogers since February 2018.
PHOTO FROM ROGERS WEBSITE
Jorge Fernandes, Chief Technology Officer of Rogers Communications
On the phone, Rogers’ spokeswoman, Chloé Luciani-Girouard, did not deny our information, but did not want to comment on this specific situation, confining herself to referring us to the various communications published over the past week by Rogers at about the breakdown. She also told us that CEO Tony Staffieri was unavailable for an interview.
Problematic update
Rogers said last weekend that the July 8 outage was caused by a maintenance update to its core network. After beginning at dawn on Friday July 8, the outage lasted all day, and service began to recover in the evening. Full recovery, however, was not achieved until the following days.
In a report published by The Press earlier this week, Pierre C. Bélanger, professor at the University of Ottawa and specialist in communications and telecommunications regulations, pointed out that the outage had occurred at a time of year when the chief engineer was perhaps to be on vacation.
History will tell us. It didn’t happen on October 21 when everyone is in the office after returning to work. Today, we are between two seasons and there are many people traveling with [les] children. Is it a coincidence that it happened at this time? [On peut] I can be sure that Rogers could tell us that after investigation, management discovered that their quarterback was absent that week.
Pierre C. Bélanger, professor at the University of Ottawa and specialist in communications and telecommunications regulation, in an interview with The Press earlier this week
Last year, a failure caused by a software update from its partner Ericsson disrupted services at Rogers for 16 hours. This update caused devices to disconnect from the network.
It was Jorge Fernandes who had publicly apologized to customers and provided explanations in an official letter. This week, CEO Tony Staffieri signed the public statement issued in the wake of the July 8 outage.
After describing the July 8 interruption of services as “unacceptable”, the Federal Minister of Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, on Monday asked the leaders of the country’s telecommunications companies to reach a formal agreement to here 60 days on emergency roaming and mutual assistance during blackouts, in addition to developing a communication protocol to better inform the public and authorities during an emergency.
The outage a week ago comes as Rogers seeks regulatory approval to acquire rival Shaw, a deal valued at $26 billion including debt. The Competition Bureau opposes the transaction, arguing in particular that the merger would result in higher prices and lower quality of service.