‘Very, very alarming’: B.C. tech expert digs into Rogers outage
A British Columbia tech journalist has given his take on Rogers’ massive service failure.
Andy Baryer, the former host and producer of GetConnected, Canada’s longest-running tech show, said the failure of Rogers’ service highlights many of the concerns of experts.
Read more:
Rogers service recovers, but major BC services still impacted
« It’s been about 24 hours and we still don’t know what the cause was, » Baryer told Global News on Saturday morning.
« On Friday, I suspected it was a cyberattack, but it doesn’t seem to be the case (now). »
He continued, « A company called Cloudflare, which manages internet traffic around the world, suspects this is an internal error. »
Read more:
Rogers says wireless services have been restored for the ‘vast majority’ as massive outage drags on
Cloudflare posted on its site saying as much.
“Based on what we are seeing and similar incidents in the past, we believe this is likely an internal error, and not a cyberattack,” Cloudflare staff wrote in a post. of blogging.
Baryer said a failure as large as this is not just concerning, but puzzling, as protocols are supposed to be in place to prevent such a large failure.
“These networks are designed with redundancies in place to make sure something like this doesn’t happen. The fact that this happened is very, very alarming,” Baryer said.
« You don’t see this in other countries and this is the second time in 15 months that Rogers’ network has gone down. »
The tech expert said one of the obvious concerns that has been highlighted with the outage is Canada’s reliance on just three major telecom companies.
« It shows how unfair it is in Canada that we only have three big carriers, » Baryer said.
“We are already paying high prices for our internet bills and mobile phone bills and now we have these kinds of service disruptions. This brings back the rhetoric that we would use a fourth carrier.
Customer compensation has been widely discussed online, and Baryer said it’s hard to say how much compensation might be in the works.
« It’s going to be an interesting thing to see how much they compensate their users, » Baryer said.
“Compensation for their customers (is pending). They still have to compensate the Canadian economy and all the small businesses that suffered on Friday.”
The outage also led to speculation that the Rogers and Shaw merger might be « dead in the water, » according to Baryer.
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
globalnews
