The second significant outage to hit one of Canada’s largest telecom carriers in 15 months, Rogers Communications Inc.’s mobile and internet networks on Friday caused extensive disruptions across the country, affecting banks and police emergency lines.
Rogers issued a statement saying, “We are currently experiencing an outage across our landline and cellular networks and our technical teams are working hard to restore services as soon as possible.”
The disruption, which seems to be worse than the one that mostly afflicted customers last year, occurs as Rogers is attempting to acquire Shaw Communications, a competitor company, in a C$20 billion deal.
The proposed acquisition of Shaw by Rogers was halted by Canada’s competition bureau because it would stifle competition in a nation where telecom costs are among the highest in the world.
The largest service provider in Ontario, Rogers, along with BCE Inc., and Telus Corp., controls 90% of the market share in Canada with about 10 million cellphone users and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers.
The Rogers outage will probably cause many to worry about the level of industry competitiveness.
Anthony Lacavera, managing director of Globealive, an investment company that had made a bid for a wireless provider involved in the Rogers/Shaw merger, said that today’s outage “illustrates the need for more independent competition that will drive more network investment so outages are far less likely.”
Police in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, warned that some callers would have trouble getting through to emergency services when making 911 calls. Police in Toronto, the largest city in Canada, expressed a similar worry despite claiming that their call center was completely working.
A number of Canadian banks use Interac’s email money transfer service, and the company claimed the downtime was impacting its operations. The Interac e-Transfer service was having system problems, according to Toronto-Dominion Bank.
While Royal Bank of Canada stated that its ATM and online banking services were impacted, the Bank of Montreal claimed that the outage affected financial institutions, toll-free numbers, as well as transactions.
Over 20,000 users reported the outage to Downdetector, which records outages by combining status information from several sources. By 9 am ET, there were just about 10,000 reports left.
On Friday morning, when no services were available, Canadians had to scurry. “During my morning stroll, I noticed roughly 20 individuals outside Starbucks checking their cellphones, most likely because of the Rogers outage. Additionally crowded this morning with people conducting business meetings are coffee establishments “Bojan Land, a Twitter user stated.
Some Canadians made an effort to maintain their sense of humor despite their unhappiness. Yair Karlberger tweeted, “The beautiful thing about this #rogersoutage is that I can’t get 32 spam calls before noon.”
