Canada’s Internet Outage caused by ‘Maintenance’

One of Canada’s largest mobile and internet providers, Rogers, has apologised for the country-wide outage of its services which began on Friday. The company’s CEO Tony Staffieri said the failure followed “a Maintenance update in our core network. The Friday night blackout had an impact on banking, emergency services, transportation, and even 911 hotlines and ATMs.

To make connections, Canadians went to coffee shops and libraries. Most services have now been restored, although the service outage on Friday started at 04:30 local time (08:30 GMT) and lasted for more than 15 hours.The Maintenance operation, according to Mr. Staffieri, “caused several of our routers to fail early Friday morning.” A reminder of how dependent society has become on contemporary communications, the outage had a significant impact on a wide range of services across Canada.

Hospitals requested on-call employees to report to work until the problem was fixed after many 911 systems reported problems with incoming calls.One mother, Lara Morgan, explained how it was difficult for her to call 911 after her son had an apparent spinal injury during a rugby match. The corporation was “especially worried that some clients could not access emergency services,” according to a statement from Mr. Staffieri. The Weeknd’s Toronto concert date was among the activities that had to be postponed due to the outage. The concert was scheduled to take place at Rogers Communications’ Toronto Blue Jays stadium.

After jail staff were unable to connect disgraced fashion magnate Peter Nygard to a videoconference system, a judge in Montreal, Quebec, had to postpone the trial hearing for Nygard. According to critics, the outage proved that Canada’s telecommunications industry needs more competition. Ninety percent of the Canadian market is in the hands of three corporations: Telus Corp., BCE Inc., and Rogers. With a stake in everything from hockey to cable television, Rogers is the sole mobile provider for almost 11 million Canadians.