Rogers CEO apologizes for massive service outage, blames maintenance update

The fallout from a massive network outage at Rogers Communications that shut down mobile and internet services across much of Canada continued to come into focus on Saturday, even as the company restored most services and began offering an explanation as to what happened.

The widespread disruption, which got underway early Friday morning, paralyzed communications across a number of sectors, including health care, law enforcement and the financial industry. Many 911 services couldn't receive incoming calls, several hospitals reported impacts to their services and debit transactions were paused when Interac was knocked offline.

Small business owners were among those hardest hit by the outage, which left them unable to process debit card payments.

Sharif Ahmed, the owner of Plantforsoul plant shop in Toronto's west end, said the outage left him feeling helpless, as he turned away customers who didn't have cash.

"It pretty much stopped my business," he said in an interview on Saturday. "Most of the people, they don't use cash anymore, so pretty much, I sat down in my office doing nothing."

Suddenly not being able to take card payments is a "big problem," he said. "We just can't stop, we're paying rent and everything."

At nearby Caked Coffee, owner Supreet Arora said people came in thinking it was just their Wi-Fi and cellphones that were affected — only to find out that the café also had no Wi-Fi.

"They came in [and] you want to help them out, [but] there's no Wi-Fi here," he said in an interview on Saturday.

Arora said he kept forgetting to tell people he was only able to take cash until he'd made their food, so he served them anyway, noting that many people came back to pay on Saturday.

Late Saturday afternoon, Rogers president and CEO Tony Staffieri said service had been restored and that the company's "networks and systems are close to fully operational."

In a written statement, Staffieri said the company is continuing to monitor its network for issues and investigate the root cause of the outage.

"We now believe we've narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning," he said.

Staffieri apologized for the outage, adding that "we're particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority."

Richard Leblanc, a professor of governance, law and ethics at York University in Toronto, said the outage was a learning opportunity for threat actors, such as Russian state-sponsored hackers, who can now see how vulnerable Canadian industry, financial institutions and health-care systems are to an attack on a telecom provider.