Some Ontarians still don't have service after the Rogers outage

A day after a Rogers outage saw customers wake up to widespread service outages, most Ontario residents are back online – but not all.

There's still no service for many in Oshawa, Ont. today, and local businesses are still trying to make do.

Ben Darrah, owner of Popeyes Supplements, told CTV News Toronto Saturday he’s still operating his business without being able to access Interac, mobility or internet services.

“We’ve got somebody running to TD right now just to grab us loonies, toonies, so we can give the right amount of change to customers,” Darrah said.

“It’s pretty difficult, with our POS system down, we can’t check stock - anything really. We can’t communicate with other stores,” he said.

Another Oshawa resident, in line for an ATM, expressed concerns over accessing medical care while services are down.

“You can’t even call 9-1-1 if you need it,” she said. “It’s horrible – I just had a daughter two weeks ago – God forbid something happened to her and we couldn’t get a hold of anybody.”
 

WHAT CAUSED THE ROGERS OUTAGE?

On Saturday, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri offered Canadians an apology, and an explanation.

“We've narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update that we did late Thursday evening, early Friday morning,” Staffieri said in a statement.

“That update caused some of the routers in our system to malfunction and that malfunction caused traffic overload. And as a result of that, the whole system just shuts down,” he continued.

Former CEO of Rogers, Toronto Mayor John Tory is still a member of the Rogers family trust.

“The people over there at Rogers are studying this as I’m sure they are very careful to see what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Tory said Friday.

WHAT DID THE ROGERS OUTAGE IMPACT?

The city’s BikeShare system runs on Rogers and was completely down for the day, alongside the Green-P parking system and Metrolinx’ ticketing system.

The Scarborough Health Network was forced to ask all on-call staff to report to work once learning of the outage, as they’d no way to contact staff if needed.

Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children said the outage caused disruptions with their virtual appointment system, stating impacted patients would be contacted to rebook appointments

Toronto concert venues urged patrons to print out physical copies of tickets because many virtual ticket reading applications are out of service due to the outage. The Weeknd’s concert in Toronto Friday night had to be rescheduled.

Multiple Ontario police departments were also impacted by the outage, with many Ontario customers not able to dial 911.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) said some travellers have had issues submitting their travel documents through the ArriveCAN app. Travellers were advised to provide paper copies of their proof of vaccination and travel details via the traveller contact information form.

In April 2021, Rogers experienced a country-wide outage that saw many unable to place calls, send text messages, or access their internet browers. The communications company attributed this outage to a software issue.