In the wake of the major outage of its cellular, TV, and Internet services that began early Friday morning and continues to linger, Rogers Communications president and chief executive officer Tony Staffieri has issued another message explaining what the company believes was the cause: “a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning.”
Ironically, a maintenance issue in the form of a bad software update to core networking equipment took Rogers offline in April 2021. At the time, Rogers’ chief technology officer Jorge Fernandes was the person issuing the apologies and explanations.
This time, however, given the scope and magnitude of the outage, the man at the top is communicating directly.
“As CEO, I take full responsibility for ensuring we at Rogers earn back your full trust,” he wrote, “and am focused on the following action plan to further strengthen the resiliency of our network:
Fully restore all services: While this has been nearly done, we are continuing to monitor closely to ensure stability across our network as traffic returns to normal.
Complete root cause analysis and testing: Our leading technical experts and global vendors are continuing to dig deep into the root cause and identify steps to increase redundancy in our networks and systems.
Make any necessary changes: We will take every step necessary, and continue to make significant investments in our networks to strengthen our technology systems, increase network stability for our customers, and enhance our testing. ”
Although Staffieri says that services have been restored, numerous reports such as these on Twitter debate this, with customers complaining that some or all of their services are still not functioning, or only function intermittently.
Not true- my internet, home phone, and tv are still down. @RogersHelps
— Wei-Ling (@weilinglee) July 9, 2022
@RogersHelps not true for me. I continue to have to rely on using data on my cell as the wifi in my home is barely working. Cannot load webpages or apps. Not helpful. Very disappointed. I hope this supposed credit accounts for continued disruption today.
— Angela 😷💉💉💉❤️ (@Anna_E_Banana) July 9, 2022
Customers to receive a credit
Staffieri added, “We will proactively credit all customers automatically for yesterday’s outage. This credit will be automatically applied to your account and no action is required from you.” (emphasis ours; scammers are reportedly already contacting Rogers customers claiming they need to provide information in order to get the credit).
We are aware of scam text messages being sent claiming to offer credits in the wake of yesterday’s service interruptions. We will apply the credit proactively to your account & no action is required. If you receive a suspicious SMS, please forward it to 7726 (SPAM).
— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) July 9, 2022
He concluded, “We let you down yesterday. You have my personal commitment that we can, and will, do better. “
