Rogers restores service after internet outage across Canada

On Saturday, Rogers Communications said it had restored service for the "vast majority" of customers affected by the outage that left many Canadians without internet access. “As our services come back online and traffic volumes return to normal, some customers may experience a delay in regaining full service,” the telecommunications company said in a Twitter update posted late Thursday evening. She then promised that she was "working hard" to get any customers who still don't have internet access back online "as quickly as possible".

In a letter attributed to Chairman and CEO Tony Staffieri, Rogers said it was "working to fully understand the root cause of this outage" and would make "the necessary changes" to avoid a repeat at the future. In addition, the company has promised to send a credit note on the invoice to each customer affected by the outage.

While Rogers has yet to share what caused its entire network to go down for most of an entire day, DDoS mitigation company Cloudflare has provided a possible answer. “Based on what we are seeing and similar incidents in the past, we believe this is likely an internal error, and not a cyberattack,” the company said in a blog post. published on Friday. Cloudflare speculated that a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) issue likely contributed to the outage. A "routine BGP update gone wrong" was the cause of the massive outage that took down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp last fall.

Whatever caused the outage, its effect was easy to see. People crowded into cafes and public libraries so they could use their phones and computers. At one point, Toronto police even noted that some people were unable to call 911 due to the outage. Across the country, Interac, the system used by Canadian banks to connect their networks, was down, causing debit cards and ATMs to malfunction. An analysis by internet monitoring organization NetBlocks showed that Canada's domestic connectivity dropped to 75% of normal levels during the event. If nothing else, the episode is likely to reignite the conversation in Canada about Rogers' dominance in the national telecommunications market.

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.