rogers outage

This is what the government is doing to make sure there's never another Rogers outage

The Canadian public has been speaking out about how absolutely messed up Friday's Rogers outage was, and it looks like the government has actually... listened?

After the absolute chaos that ensued Friday — with tens of thousands of customers nationwide unable to communicate, work or even purchase goods and services — people are boycotting the company, demanding that the Rogers Centre name be changed and that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau make some changes, among other things.

And, though it's extremely unlikely that the first demand will ever happen, it seems that the second actually is.

The fact that so many individuals and businesses were aboslutely screwed due to the blackout showed a lot about how problematic the telecom industry oligopoly in Canada is — and the feds are looking to fix that so we never get into such a situation again (because based on Rogers's track record, we know it would otherwise).

Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne has presented a solution that would require the Big-3 telecom giants to work together in the case of future outages to prevent things from getting as bad as they did last week.

The Minister has asked the companies to come to some sort of agreement to provide one another with assistance in such scenarios, to make sure customers have access to emergency roaming at all times, and to implement a communications protocol for handling issues like these, which needs to include more frequent and thorough public updates.

Executives will have 60 business days to meet the above terms, which Champagne called "a first step" to changing the industry in Canada.

"Canadians deserve more from their providers in terms of quality and reliability of service and I will ensure they meet the high standard that Canadians expect, including improving competition, innovation and affordability," he wrote on Twitter Monday afternoon.

Rogers has blamed the blackout on "a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning," promising to "make any necessary changes" to ensure network stability.

Some people were still without internet, tv and/or wireless service as of Monday evening. As compensation, the carrier is offering an automatic rebate to people's accounts of about two days' worth of service.

Lead photo by

Becky Robertson


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