Huge Rogers outage leaves 10k homes in Toronto without service and people are raging

A Rogers outage is impacting some 10,000 residences in Toronto today, leaving people scrambling to work remotely and otherwise carry on with their day without any internet access.

Customer reports of outages in multiple neighbourhoods of the city began to flood social media early Monday afternoon, with Rogers confirming in a statement that there's a technical issue impeding internet, TV, home phone, Rogers Ignite internet and Rogers Ignite TV services in parts of the Thorncliffe, Upper Beaches, and Don Mills communities.

Ans it's now Tuesday at 7.30am and its still out!!! What is goin on.

— Sylvia Bury (@SylviaBury) September 26, 2023

The statement assures clients that teams are diligently working to repair the issue, which stems from a major distribution fibre cable that was cut by third-party construction crews working in the area.

Additional damage to other infrastructure, including underground ducts, has delayed the whole process — and also served to inflame customers' tempers as the outage drags on.

Many claim that updates from the provider have been few and far between (or hours late), adding insult to injury.

I received the text about service interruption 17 hours after the internet went down. Super on top of things over at Rogers.

— JesseL (@Jesse_Lyn08) September 26, 2023

While the telecom giant did not give an estimate for when services might be restored at first, it now says that it hopes to have things up and running for some households by later afternoon Tuesday, with progress continuing for remaining account holders through the night.

Their statement to the public also notes that the fix requires "highly specialized and detailed work of linking individual fibre strands together."

Despite the fact that Rogers has issued an automatic three-day credit to affected customers along with the formal apology, some aren't happy with the compensation offered and are airing their general frustrations with the telecommunications industry in Canada, a problematic triopoly that has citizens paying some of the highest rates for internet and phone in the world.

You know it is bad when they are proactively offering a refund... Canadians pay the highest Internet services costs in the world... and we only occasionally get to use these services #RogersOutage #Rogers

— Dr. Tanya Pobuda #SearchTheLandfill (@PobudaTanya) September 26, 2023

Rogers confirmed the outage to blogTO on Tuesday, adding that its technical teams have managed to reroute some traffic to backup paths to remedy the situation for at least some homes.

"We are working to repair the fibre damage to restore services as soon as possible," a spokesperson said. "We sincerely apologize to our impacted customers for the service interruption."