What happened? Rogers executives to brief politicians about recent network outage

Officials from Rogers Communications Inc. and a slew of other stakeholders are set to appear at a parliamentary committee in Ottawa on Monday to explain how the company's recent massive network outage happened, and outline the steps they are taking to make sure it won't happen again.

On the morning of July 8, the entire Rogers network — from cable television, to internet and wireless telephone services — went down, and remained so for much of the day while the company scrambled to figure out what happened.

Late in the day, the company isolated and addressed the core problem, which they said was caused by a software update gone wrong, which then cascaded into a massive chain reaction that took down the entire system.

The outage triggered a slew of seemingly unrelated systems to fail beyond the company itself, as things as varied as debit payments, 911 services and government services were unavailable for much of the day, causing havoc.

A wide cross section of Canadian life was touched by the outage, sparking anger from consumers and government officials who demanded compensation and assurances that the system will be remade with failsafes included to ensure there are functioning backups when things go wrong.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the country's telecom regulator, was at the top of the pile of those seeking a satisfying explanation. The CRTC sent Rogers a letter on the following Tuesday demanding answers to dozens of questions.

The company was given a deadline of July 22 to reply to those concerns and apparently did so, as the regulator published a redacted version of Rogers' explanations on the CRTC's website on Friday evening.

On Sunday, Rogers released more details of what it plans to do, which includes:

"I know that it is only through these actions that we can begin to restore your confidence in Rogers and earn back your trust," Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said.

Questions remain, however, and politicians and the public will get a chance to prod the company for more details at hearings in Ottawa starting at 11 a.m. ET, when senior Rogers officials including Staffieri, chief regulatory officer Ted Woodhead and newly minted chief technology officer Ron McKenzie will appear in front of the Standing Committee on Technology and Industry.

Rogers has been trying to assuage anger since the outage, with Staffieri saying that the firm is going to do whatever it takes to makes things right. "It is clear that what matters most is that we ensure this doesn't happen again," Staffieri said in an open letter to Canadians. "You have my personal commitment that Rogers will make every change and investment needed to help ensure that it will not happen again."

Comments from Ron McKenzie should be especially interesting to watch, since he has only been on the job for less than a week, after the previous CTO, Jorge Fernandes, was ousted on July 21.

"I don't think he had any choice but to resign or depart," said Patrick Horan, an analyst at Agilith Capital in Toronto, of Fernandes' sudden ouster. "He had to fall on the sword in a very delicate situation."

Horan said Rogers' explanation — that a problem with a third party's equipment managed to knock down all the company's services — doesn't sit right in the telecom world, where redundancies and backups are the norm.