Millions Of Canadian Households & Businesses Offline

More than 10 million customers of Rogers Communications, one of the largest Canadian telecoms companies were knocked offline in a 19-hour nationwide outage affecting over a quarter of the country's population.

The outage began overnight on 8th July when police services reported that 911 services were inaccessible on many mobile phones and customers were unable to access their Internet and or wireless connected services.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the regulatory body that oversees Rogers and other Canadian telecoms, couldn't receive calls and Rogers came under immediate from regulators to explain what happened

• Hospitals have reported serious communications problems, and one Ontario hospital had to redirect cancer patients when emergency radiation treatments would not work because of the outage. 

• Banking services were disrupted, and many businesses could not accept debit payments or could only take cash.

• Fans of pop superstar The Weeknd, who come from Toronto, were turned away after he was forced to cancel a hometown tour stop at the Rogers Centre stadium.

The company, one of Canada's main telecoms firms, is now facing intense scrutiny from the federal government and the CRTC, which has ordered Rogers to explain in detail what caused the "unacceptable" shutdown. Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri blamed the system failure on a maintenance update and has apologised to customers, offering a five days service credit as compensation.

But questions remain about how a seemingly routine process left millions without crucial access to online services.

Long before the outage frustration with Canada's telecoms industry has been described as a national pastime, uniting the country much like ice hockey and golf. Telecoms firms have argued that Canada's large land mass and sparse population make it expensive for telecoms to provide service.

Rogers has experienced particularly difficult times in recent months and the most recent mass outage was the second in two years. While this incident is not thought to have been caused by malicious activity, the poor relations between Canada and China over the arrest of a senior executive of Huawei and tensions with Russia over the conflict in Ukraine may not be coincidental. 

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