Canadian telecoms company Rogers is suffering from a major outage affecting landline phones, cellular connections and internet connections across Canada that began early today. The failure has also separated Interac, the network used by Canadian banks, is disabling debit cards, ATMs and the e-transfer services that recently hit over 1 billion transactions in a year. Downdetector listed thousands of reports for the problems when people got up around 5am and couldn’t get online.
Rogers addressed the failure first in a tweet from his official support account just before 9am ET and then fell silent for a couple of hours. In a statement to The Verge and tweeted Around 11:30 a.m. ET, Rogers said, “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. On behalf of all of us at Rogers, we sincerely apologize to our customers and will continue to update you as we have more information to share, including when we expect service to be available again. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.”
On behalf of all of us at Rogers, we sincerely apologize to our customers and will continue to update you as we have more information to share, including when we expect service to be available again. pic.twitter.com/JIjGRUzxe5
— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) July 8, 2022
Cloudflare radar chart showing traffic change to and from Rogers dropping to zero earlier today, Image: Cloudflare
Cloudflare Radar shows communication between its load-sharing network and Rogers in Canada, showing its normal nightly pattern before falling to essentially zero at around 3-4 p.m. ET and registering a flat line ever since. At the same time, there has been a massive spike in BGP announcements to the network indicating changes in routing, but it is unknown if these were a trigger for the incident or a result of the network going offline.
Internet network disruption tracker NetBlocks shared real-time data shows Canada’s national connectivity has dropped to just 75 percent of its normal level.
ℹ️ Update: The internet and telecom outage in #Canada is ongoing, with a quarter of the country’s observable connectivity currently suspended; Metrics show major impact on Rogers/Fido and a number of smaller network providers pic.twitter.com/HbcoM7PRKB
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) July 8, 2022
According to a report by CBC News, Rogers’ daughter Fido is also struggling. According to the article, issues have impacted card payment processing and ATMs across Canada. A CBC radio station in Kitchener, Ontario is also offline, and some telephone services for the Ottawa transit agency were knocked out. Images from Toronto show people crammed into cafes or going to the library to access Wi-Fi now that their other options are offline.
TekSavvy Customer Service said customers The outage extends to “Ontario, Quebec and the eastern provinces,” with no ETA for a fix, while the CBC reports that Thunder Bay operator Tbaytel says the Rogers outage is nationwide.
Toronto police tweeted early this morning after some people in the city experienced connectivity issues when calling 911. “The Rogers Network is experiencing some technical difficulties,” the Toronto Police Operations Twitter account said. “We are working to solve these problems.” in one follow up tweetPolice confirmed their 911 center is operational and advised anyone who needs to call to hold the line when they connect and to try calls again if they don’t.
INTERAC e-Transfer services are not available at most financial institutions, affecting the ability to send and receive payments. We are awaiting updates from Rogers on their resolution.
— INTERAC (@INTERAC) July 8, 2022
Update July 8, 9:52 am ET: Added Bank of Montreal information.
Update July 8, 11:20 am ET: Ongoing outage detected, added information from Cloudflare Radar, TekSavvy and Tbaytel.
Update July 8, 11:33 am ET: Added explanation from Rogers.
Update July 8, 12:40 p.m. ET: Added latest update of NetBlocks.
Update July 8, 1:31 p.m. ET: Added additional information about the Interac Banking network outage, thanks mbarriault.