Huge Rogers service outage is even impacting customers roaming outside Canada

Countless internet customers were thrust back into the Stone Age on Friday morning due to a massive Rogers outage that essentially turned phones into expensive bricks.

The outage has caused a ripple effect across Canada as customers scramble for the closest cafe, business, or anywhere with functional WiFi to pick up the pieces of their work days.

But the outage is also affecting customers travelling abroad.

Rogers' connectivity issues have been causing mayhem at the border with the outage crippling the ArriveCan app, and even travellers outside of the country are finding that their phones are effectively useless.

One traveller on a trip in the U.S. reached out to blogTO, explaining that roaming data is also problematic for Rogers customers piggybacking off of other networks.

Dawn Lee says that "I am in Portland, Oregon and roaming is impacted too. I am only able to use my phone on WiFi. I was trying to use Maps and Spotify to get around but not working - no service, even roaming on T-Mobile."

Lee says she was alerted to the ongoing chaos north of the border, saying, "I saw a post from home in Toronto earlier and thought 'lucky I am away.'"

"Then soon after I was trying to play Spotify in my car and input a destination into Google Maps and neither were responding. I looked closer at my phone, and I saw 'No Service.'"

Lee says she then went to a local cafe — a familiar story — to download an offline map from Google to help navigate the streets of Portland.

According to outage tracking site Downdetector, problems with the Rogers network were first recorded around 5 a.m. on Friday.

Approaching 12 hours after the system crashed, Rogers is still working on resolving the issue.

In a statement issued at 3:20 p.m., the company stated that "our technical teams are working to restore our services alongside our global technology partners, and are making progress."