Two days after a massive outage that knocked Rogers customers across the country offline, some are still reporting problems with lost or poor connectivity, although the company says nearly the entire network is back online.
“Since the so-called return to service report from Rogers, I’ve had nothing but bad service,” John Lane of Oshawa told CTVNews.ca in an email Sunday.
“I can’t access many websites including TD bank, Toronto real estate site and many others. The service I have is very slow.”
Multiple people wrote to CTVNews.ca over the weekend to say they were still without phone, internet or television or had poor connections, which the company warned could be a possibility for some.
Responses were emailed to CTVNews.ca and not all have been independently verified.
The widespread outage affected not only phone and Internet services, but also banks, debit purchases, passport offices, 911 calls and Canada’s ArriveCAN app, which is required for travelers coming into the country.
Images of people standing outside cafes looking for free Wi-Fi highlighted the lengths some people went to to reconnect.
Rogers said in a statement Saturday that it had restored service to the “vast majority” of customers. The company’s CEO, Tony Staffieri, apologized for the outage and said “almost 100 percent” of the company’s network was back online as of Saturday afternoon.
But as some services come back online and traffic returns to normal, the company said restoration of full service may be delayed for some customers. Staffieri also told CTV News Channel that “less than one percent” of customers are still experiencing “intermittent problems.”
Staffieri also blamed the network failure on a maintenance update that caused some routers in the system to shut down.
But as the problems continued Saturday, some customers continued to be stranded, including some older Canadians.
“I live in (an) apartment with a lot of elderly people who only have landlines,” Lindy Adams of Owen Sound, Ontario. said CTVNews.ca on Saturday.
Adams said phone lines remained down Saturday, with no way to reach family or 911, and at least five people were unable to get their prescription drugs.
Engy Ayad of SEM Construction in London, Ont., said that because Interact’s payments have declined, the company has been unable to pay half of its employees, who receive their paychecks by wire transfer.
“I went to the bank and they said there was nothing they could do to help, even though they had Bell internet, but Interac itself was down,” Ayad said in an email to CTVNews.ca on Saturday.
“People’s livelihoods were affected by not being paid on time. It was just awful.”
Rogers says it will automatically credit customers to make up for lost service.
The company’s cellular network also suffered a similar nationwide service outage in April 2021, which Rogers attributed to a software update.
‘LEAP OF FAITH’
After the cash registers went down at Bufala Pizzeria in North Vancouver, British Columbia, manager Michael Littleford implemented an IOU system, taking customers’ names and phone numbers in hopes that they would return and pay when they had the money.
Within 24 hours, everyone returned and paid their dues, Littleford told CTV News Channel on Sunday.
“To be able to say we trust you to come back and pay your $200 for food and bar is a pretty big leap of faith to be able to say that to somebody in this day and age.” It looks very unusual and uncomfortable,” he said.
While disappointing, the moment reminded him of the “humanity of people,” he said.
“But we are a public restaurant. We’re not downtown Vancouver, we’re in North Vancouver in Edgemont Village, and a lot of the people here are local and regulars, and the level of trust I think goes up when they’re in a smaller community than downtown.”
With files from CTV News
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