Rogers’ July 8 Network Outage

On Friday July 8, Rogers Communications experienced a total network outage across both wireless and wireline service. Speculation was rampant on social media about the cause being a systemwide attack by China, or Russia or U.S. “hackivists” seeking to restore Roe v. Wade. Security systems were said to have been comprised across the board and in cities like Montreal and Toronto, Brinks vans and police cruisers could be seen hovering around banks in the financial districts.

The CEO of Rogers sent out an email on Sunday, to Rogers’ customers taking responsibility, saying:

“I want to share what we know about what happened on Friday. We now believe we’ve narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction. We disconnected the specific equipment and redirected traffic, which allowed our network and services to come back online over time as we managed traffic volumes returning to normal levels.”

So much for blaming China, Russia and U.S. “hackivists.”