Rogers finally knows why millions were left without service this weekend

The nationwide Rogers outage that affected many sectors and millions of Canadians is over, but the communications company is still putting the pieces back together.

In a letter on Saturday, July 9, Rogers President and CEO Tony Staffieri outlined what happened and what they’re going to do next.

“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,” he said.

“We disconnected the specific equipment and redirected traffic, which allowed our network and services to come back online over time as we managed traffic volumes returning to normal levels.”

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“Our leading technical experts and global vendors are continuing to dig deep into the root cause and identify steps to increase redundancy in our networks and systems,” he added.

Staffieri said he takes full responsibility for earning back the trust of Rogers customers and apologized for the outage.

“We’re particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority,” he said.

Following our previous updates, we have now restored services for the vast majority of our customers and our technical teams are working hard to ensure that the remaining customers are back online as quickly as possible. pic.twitter.com/IobL7Dze6i

— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) July 9, 2022

Next, Rogers will proactively credit customers automatically on their accounts, and they have a plan of action for their next steps to fully restore all services, complete root cause analyses and testing, and make necessary changes.

Moving forward, they said they would “take every step necessary” to improve network stability for customers.

“We let you down yesterday,” Staffieri said. “You have my personal commitment that we can, and will, do better.”

Service was out for more than 12 hours on Friday, July 8, and Rogers service was “starting to recover” by the late evening. The unprecedented communications outage affected everything from transit and 911 service to banking and internet access for millions of Canadians.