Canada’s industry minister has said he plans to meet the head of Rogers Communications and other telecommunications leaders following a massive outage that knocked out Rogers’ network for at least 15 hours.
Posted at 3:58 p.m.
A statement released by François-Philippe Champagne’s office indicates that he plans to meet with, among others, the company’s President and CEO, Tony Staffieri, to discuss the importance of improving “network reliability”. across Canada”.
Mr Champagne is said to have found Friday’s service disruption “unacceptable” which prevented access to many services, including banking and emergency services, and expressed that view directly to the CEO of Rogers.
PHOTO JUSTIN TANG, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Canada’s Minister of Industry, François-Philippe Champagne
Mr Staffieri released a statement on Saturday attributing Friday’s widespread outage to a network system failure following a maintenance update, adding that the “vast majority” of customers were back online.
Failures that persist
However, many continued to report service disruptions through Sunday, including in Courtice, Ont. Resident Paul Platt says his home wireless network was only restored after more than 48 hours.
Rogers declined to comment on the ongoing outages when asked by The Canadian Press, but referred to Mr Staffieri’s earlier statement in which he said technical teams were continuing to monitor “any remaining intermittent issues”.
Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, showed that the number of people reporting problems with Rogers’ service was significantly higher than usual on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.
Montreal, Toronto and nearby Mississauga, Ontario, and the Ontario cities of London and Kitchener were among those with the most reports on the website.