Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers Communications says it has restored connectivity to the “vast majority” of customers after a major outage that suspended its Internet, mobile and home phone services on Friday. In an update posted to Twitter on Saturday morning, Rogers explained that some customers “may experience a delay in getting the full service back,” as it works to put everyone online.
The outage began Friday at 5:00 ET, lasting all day and well into the night. At the time of the outage, Internet interrupt tracker NetBlocks found that it reduced about a quarter of Canada’s connectivity.
Following our previous updates, we have now restored services for the vast majority of our customers and our technical teams are working hard to ensure that remaining customers are back online as soon as possible. pic.twitter.com/IobL7Dze6i
– RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) July 9, 2022
According to CBC, Rogers has about 9 million mobile customers and offers cable and internet to nearly 3 million people. In addition to affecting customers at Rogers, Fido and Chatr’s mobile subsidiaries, it also disconnected a number of essential services across the country, interfering with 911 calls, debit card transactions, ATMs and government agencies, including passport offices and the Canada Revenue Agency.
A chart shared by NetBlocks, which shows real-time Internet traffic data in Canada, indicates that Rogers began restoring connectivity around 12:00 ET on Saturday morning. Cloudflare Internet traffic data, a company that specializes in content delivery and DDoS mitigation, shows a similar pattern, with Internet traffic starting to rise again at midnight and rising to near-normal levels.
ℹ️ Update: Metrics show that Internet service is gradually being restored to #Canada after an outage at operator Rogers that removed a quarter of the country’s observable connectivity.
The crippling incident has raised questions about the centralization of critical infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/rJMT25e4mX
– NetBlocks (@netblocks) July 9, 2022
Interac, one of the banking networks affected by the disruption, has stated that its services are again available. The company offers a large number of debit cards, ATMs and electronic funds transfers across Canada, a service Interac recently announced that reached more than a billion transactions. Interac says it plans to “add a provider” to bolster its “existing network redundancy” to prevent its services from being disconnected in the event of another outage.
Rogers has not yet provided a reason for the disruption, but CBC reports that the Communications Security Center of Canada says “there is no evidence” of a cyberattack. Cloudflare experts also said the outage was likely caused by “an internal error, not a cyberattack.” They speculate that it could have been due to a problem with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a system that controls the flow of traffic on the Internet. BGP also played a role in an outage that toppled Facebook services last year.
Cloudflare data shows that Internet traffic is slowly returning to normal levels. Image: Cloudflare
“Once again, we sincerely apologize for the disruption this has caused to our customers and we will proactively accredit all customers,” Rogers said. “You do not need to contact us to get credit, as it will automatically apply to your account.”