General view of the Rogers Building, headquarters of Rogers Communications in Toronto, Ontario, Canada October 22, 2021. R/Carlos Osorio
July 8 (R) – A major outage of Rogers Communications Inc (RCIb.TO)’s mobile and internet networks on Friday caused widespread disruption across Canada, impacting banks and police emergency numbers in the second major outage affecting one of the largest telecom operators of the country met in 15 months.
“We are currently experiencing an outage on our wired and wireless networks and our technical teams are working hard to restore services as soon as possible,” Rogers said in a statement.
The outage, which appears larger than last year, which largely affected consumers, comes as Rogers seeks to acquire rival Shaw Communications (SJRb.TO) in a C$20 billion deal.
Canada’s competition regulator blocked Rogers’ proposed purchase of Shaw, saying it would hamper competition in the country, which has some of the highest telecom tariffs in the world.
Rogers is Ontario’s leading service provider with approximately 10 million mobile subscribers and 2.25 million retail Internet subscribers and together with BCE Inc (BCE.TO) and Telus Corp (T.TO) controls 90% of the market share in Canada.
Rogers’ departure will likely raise concerns about competition in the industry.
“Today’s outage highlights the need for more independent competition that will drive more network investment, making outages far less likely,” said Anthony Lacavera, chief executive of Globealive, an investment firm that bid for a wireless carrier involved in the Rogers/Shaw Deal was involved.
Police in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, said some callers may have trouble reaching 911 emergency services. Police in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, expressed a similar concern, although they said their call center was fully operational.
Interac, which operates an email money transfer service used by several Canadian banks, said the outage was affecting its services. Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD.TO) said it was experiencing system issues with the Interac e-Transfer service.
Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO) said the outage was affecting financial institutions, toll-free numbers and transactions, while Royal Bank of Canada (RY.TO) said its ATMs and online banking services were affected.
Downdetector, which tracks outages by aggregating status reports from a number of sources, showed over 20,000 user reports of the outage. Reports fell to nearly 10,000 by 9 a.m. ET.
Canadians, who awoke Friday morning to the reality that there were no services, had to struggle. “On my morning walk, I saw about 20 people standing in front of Starbucks checking their phones, probably because of #rogersoutage. Coffee shops are also busy this morning with people holding business meetings,” wrote Twitter user Bojan Land.
Despite the frustration, some Canadians tried to keep their sense of humor. “The great thing about this #rogersoutage is that I don’t get 32 spam calls before noon,” Yair Karlberger tweeted.
Reporting by Yuvraj Malik, Shubham Kalia and Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru; Catherine Jackson in Washington; Additional reporting by Divya Rajagopal in Toronto and Eva Matthews in Bengaluru; Writing by Ankur Banerjee; Editing of Shinjini Ganguli
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