Telecommunications company Rogers has not finished being held accountable for the major outage that occurred on July 8, and recently explained that it had not been able to transfer its customers to competing companies, despite their offer.
• Read also: National outage: Rogers replaces its chief technology officer
Rogers Communications on Friday provided its response to the letter sent to it on July 12 by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), demanding an explanation by July 22.
It is in a letter released by the CRTC that Rogers mentions that its Chief Information and Technology Officer communicated with his counterparts at Bell and TELUS as soon as the outage began.
“Bell and TELUS have offered to help. However, given the nature of the issue, Rogers quickly assessed and concluded that it was not possible to make the necessary network changes to allow our wireless customers to transition to their wireless networks.” able to read.
In addition to a technology issue to change service, the company pointed out that due to the national nature of the outage, “no competitor’s network would have been able to handle the sudden additional volume of customers wireless (more than 10.2 million) and the consequent increase in voice/data traffic”.
“If not done with care, such an attempt could have impeded the operation of other carriers’ networks,” Rogers added.
An “unacceptable failure”
Even though Rogers Communications President and CEO Tony Staffieri previously said a maintenance upgrade was the cause of the problem, the company backtracked on that point in its letter.
“We determined that the cause of the outage was a network system failure following an update to our main IP network early in the morning of Friday July 8th. This caused our IP routing network to malfunction,” it was mentioned.
The network issue during the outage was reportedly “mostly” resolved by the end of the day on Friday, but “minor instability issues persisted over the weekend.”
Rogers has since engaged an external review team to obtain further information on the outage.
The company also plans to begin a “comprehensive assessment of all of our processes, including the performance of network upgrades, disaster recovery procedures and communication with the public.”
Remember that the outage also had repercussions on the ability of citizens to reach the 911 emergency service.
On this point, Rogers assured that additional measures will be taken “to maintain or transfer to other networks the 9-1-1 service and other essential services during events like this”.
This decision is in line with the request made by the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, during a meeting with industry leaders.
Rogers also made changes to its management team, replacing its chief information and technology officer on Thursday, a position now held by Ron McKenzie.
