The federal government has been clear: measures will have to be taken by all telecommunications companies to avoid another outage like the one Rogers experienced for 3 p.m. on July 8.
This was mentioned Monday by the Minister of Innovation, François-Philippe Champagne, during an appearance before the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology of the House of Commons. So, according to what he demanded, the telecommunications giants still have 45 days to come back with an action plan.
“The three measures that I imposed on them were first to codify in a formal contract mutual assistance, second, emergency roaming and, third, the emergency communication protocol with the government and citizens”, explained Minister Champagne, specifying that immediate measures had to be taken to “ensure more resilience”.
An investigation by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which will issue recommendations, will also allow the government to take more measures to prevent such a situation from paralyzing Canadians again.
Two breakdowns in 15 months
In April 2021, Rogers subscribers were affected by a smaller outage, but which was also caused by a technical problem. This prompted some MPs, such as Conservative Gerard Deltell and New Democrat Brian Masse, to question why no action was taken at that time.
“The outage that occurred last April on our wireless services was due to a technical problem that is different from the one that occurred on July 8,” said Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri. After the April outage, changes were made to our network, our procedures, to prevent this kind of outage and any other kind of outage, but we couldn’t have known that such an outage would occur on July 8.”
Unlike the incident in 2021, the technical issue that occurred earlier this month affected the main network, “the brain” of the telecommunications giant. This therefore paralyzed the entire network of the company, explained for his part the new chief technology officer, Ron McKenzie.
Remember that the major Rogers outage on July 8 paralyzed millions of Canadians for more than 15 hours, affecting the Interac network and even 911 services.
The company announced on Sunday that it will invest $10 billion in artificial intelligence to prevent such a situation from happening again.
