Rogers CEO admits outage caused by maintenance operation

In the wake of the major outage of its cellular, TV, and Internet services that began early Friday morning and continues to linger, Rogers Communications president and chief executive officer Tony Staffieri has issued another message explaining what the company believes was the cause: “a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning.”

Ironically, a maintenance issue in the form of a bad software update to core networking equipment took Rogers offline in April 2021. At the time, Rogers’ chief technology officer Jorge Fernandes was the person issuing the apologies and explanations.

This time, however, given the scope and magnitude of the outage, the man at the top is communicating directly.

“As CEO, I take full responsibility for ensuring we at Rogers earn back your full trust,” he wrote, “and am focused on the following action plan to further strengthen the resiliency of our network:

Fully restore all services: While this has been nearly done, we are continuing to monitor closely to ensure stability across our network as traffic returns to normal.

Complete root cause analysis and testing: Our leading technical experts and global vendors are continuing to dig deep into the root cause and identify steps to increase redundancy in our networks and systems.

Make any necessary changes: We will take every step necessary, and continue to make significant investments in our networks to strengthen our technology systems, increase network stability for our customers, and enhance our testing. ”

Although Staffieri says that services have been restored, numerous reports such as these on Twitter debate this, with customers complaining that some or all of their services are still not functioning, or only function intermittently.

Customers to receive a credit

Staffieri added, “We will proactively credit all customers automatically for yesterday’s outage. This credit will be automatically applied to your account and no action is required from you.” (emphasis ours; scammers are reportedly already contacting Rogers customers claiming they need to provide information in order to get the credit).

He concluded, “We let you down yesterday. You have my personal commitment that we can, and will, do better. “

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Lynn Greiner
Lynn Greiner
Lynn Greiner has been interpreting tech for businesses for over 20 years and has worked in the industry as well as writing about it, giving her a unique perspective into the issues companies face. She has both IT credentials and a business degree.

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