Rogers Communications has named a new chief technology officer, just two weeks after its massive network outage on July 8 that left millions of Canadians unplugged.
Jorge Fernandes will be succeeded by Ron McKenzie as the new CTO immediately.
McKenzie was the president of Rogers for Business between June 2021 and July 2022. He also led technical operations at Rogers for more than two years.
Before joining Rogers, McKenzie held senior leadership roles at Shaw Communications. Combined, he has more than 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry in both Canada and the U.S.
Jorge Fernandes was Rogers’ CTO between 2018 and 2022. Before that, he had 15-years of experience at Vodafone, one of Europe’s largest telecommunications providers.
The July 2022 outage bore a resemblance to the Rogers mobile service outage that occurred just one year prior. In April 2021, a software update took down Rogers mobile services for an entire day. This time, the company blamed a maintenance update for the outage. In a report, MobileSyrup explained that the update caused its routers to malfunction, preventing them from directing network traffic.
Rogers has issued apologies along with crediting customers the equivalent of five days of service charges. In addition, the company is looking into building safeguards to prevent a similar event, including separating its wireless and wireline networks.