Following a severe outage that knocked out internet, mobile, and home phone services on Friday, Rogers Communications says it has restored access to the “vast majority” of customers. Rogers stated on Twitter on Saturday morning that some customers “may notice a delay in recovering full service” as the company works to bring everyone back online.
The outage began at 5 a.m. ET on Friday and lasted throughout the day and well into the evening. NetBlocks, an internet disruption tracker, discovered that the outage knocked off almost a fifth of Canada’s access at the time.
According to CBC, Rogers has around 9 million mobile users and serves nearly 3 million people with cable and internet. In addition to hurting clients of Rogers’ mobile subsidiaries, Fido and Chatr, it also disrupted a variety of critical services across the country, including 911 calls, debit card transactions, ATMs, and government organizations such as Canada’s passport offices and Revenue Agency.
According to a graphic supplied by NetBlocks that shows real-time internet traffic data in Canada, Rogers began to restore service at approximately 12AM ET Saturday morning. Data from Cloudflare, a company that specializes in content delivery and DDoS mitigation, shows a similar pattern, with internet traffic picking up again about midnight and returning to near-normal levels.
Interac, one of the affected banking networks, has stated that its services are now operational. The corporation supports a vast number of debit cards, ATMs, and electronic fund transfers across Canada, with Interac recently announcing that the service has reached one billion transactions. Interac wants to “additionally reinforce” its “current network redundancy” to assist avoid its services from going offline in the event of another outage.
Rogers has not yet provided an explanation for the outage, but the Canadian Communications Security Establishment says there is “no sign” of a cyberattack, according to the CBC. Cloudflare experts also stated that the outage was most likely caused by “an internal fault, not a cyber attack.” They believe it was caused by a problem with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a technology that governs the flow of traffic on the internet. BGP was also involved in an outage that disrupted Facebook’s services last year.
