Industry minister to meet Rogers CEO after ‘unacceptable’ outage

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Canada’s industry minister said he plans to meet the head of Rogers Communications and other telecoms leaders following a massive outage that effectively knocked out Rogers’ network for at least 15 hours.

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A statement released by Francois-Philippe Champagne’s office says he plans to meet with Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri, among others, to discuss the importance of improving « network reliability across Canada. » .

The statement says Champagne found last week’s service disruption ‘unacceptable’ that prevented access to many law enforcement, healthcare and banking services and expressed that view directly. to the CEO of Rogers.

Staffieri released a statement on Saturday attributing Friday’s widespread outage to a network system failure following a maintenance update, adding that the « vast majority » of customers were back online.

But many continued to report service disruptions through Sunday, including in Courtice, Ont. Resident Paul Platt, who says his home wireless network was only restored after more than 48 hours.

Rogers declined to comment on the ongoing outages when asked by The Canadian Press, but referenced Staffieri’s earlier statement in which he said technical teams were continuing to monitor « any remaining intermittent issues. »

Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, showed the number of people reporting problems with Rogers’ service was significantly higher than usual on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Montreal, Toronto and nearby Mississauga, Ontario, and the Ontario cities of London and Kitchener were among those with the most reports on the website.