Canadian telecom giant Rogers Communications says it has restored connectivity to the “vast majority” of customers after a major outage that shut down its internet, mobile and home phone services on Friday. In posted an update on Twitter on Saturday morning, Rogers explained that some customers “may experience a delay in regaining full service” as it works to get everyone back online.
The outage began as early as 5 a.m. ET on Friday and lasted all day and well into the evening. At the time of the outage, internet outage tracker NetBlocks found that it has cut about a quarter of Canada’s connectivity.
After our previous updates, we have now restored services for the vast majority of our customers and our technical teams are working hard to get the remaining customers back online as soon as possible. pic.twitter.com/IobL7Dze6i
— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) July 9, 2022
According to CBCRogers has approximately 9 million mobile customers and provides cable and Internet services to nearly 3 million people. In addition to impacting customers of Rogers’ mobile subsidiaries, Fido and Chatr, it also shut down a range of essential services across the country, with 911 calls† debit card transactionsATMs and government agencies, including: Canada’s Passport Offices and tax authorities†
A graph shared by NetBlocksshowing real-time internet traffic data in Canada indicates that Rogers began restoring connectivity around noon ET Saturday morning. Internet traffic data from Cloudflarea company that specializes in delivering content and reducing DDoS shows a similar pattern, with internet traffic starting to pick up again at midnight and rising to near-normal levels.
ℹ️ Update: Statistics show that Internet service is gradually being restored in #Canada after an outage at operator Rogers that knocked out a quarter of the country’s observable connectivity.
The crippling incident has raised questions about the centralization of critical infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/rJMT25e4mX
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) July 9, 2022
Interac, one of the banking networks affected by the outage, has stated that its services are available again. The company operates a large number of debit cards, ATMs and electronic funds transfers across Canada, a service Interac recently announced that it has reached over a billion transactions† Interac says it plans to “add a supplier” to bolster its “existing network redundancy” to prevent its services from going offline in the event of another outage.
Rogers has not yet given a reason for the outage, but CBC reports that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment says there is “no indication” of a cyberattack. Cloudflare experts also said the outage was likely caused by “an internal flaw, not a cyber attack.” They speculate that it may be due to a problem with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a system that controls the flow of traffic on the Internet. BGP also played a role in an outage that shut down Facebook’s services last year.
“Once again, we sincerely apologize for the disruption this has caused our customers and we will proactively credit all customers,” Rogers said. “You don’t need to contact us for the credit as it will be automatically applied to your account.”
