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Rogers says services mostly restored after daylong outage left millions offline – CBC News
Rogers services are back online for most customers after a daylong outage at the telecom giant that left millions of Canadians without internet and cellular service, while also disrupting government services and payment systems.
Some individual users saw their internet connections and cellphones come back to life Friday evening, and an update sent to CBC’s IT department said the problem in Rogers’s “core network … looks to have recovered.”
In an update Saturday morning, posted to Twitter, Rogers said it has now restored services for the “vast majority of our customers” and that its technical teams are working hard to ensure that the remaining customers are back online as quickly as possible.
The Toronto-based company has offered no timeline for when service may be restored to all customers.
Tony Staffieri, chief executive and president of Rogers, said in an open letter that the company apologizes for the service interruption. He gave no explanation for the outage or how many customers were affected.
The outage began some time early Friday morning; throughout the day the company said little about its cause or when it might end.
“We don’t understand how the different levels of redundancy that we build across the network coast to coast have not worked,” said Kye Prigg, Rogers’ senior vice-president of access networks and operations, on CBC’s Power & Politics.
“We are working very, very hard on making sure that we get everything running as soon as possible,” he told host Catherine Cullen.
Rogers senior vice-president Kye Prigg says the company is examining the root cause of an issue that left millions of Canadians without cellular service on Friday, but cannot at this time give an estimated time for ‘full recovery of the networks.’
The company has approximately nine million wireless customers and just shy of three million on the cable and internet side of the business.
Responding to questions about compensation, Rogers said earlier that it would be “proactively crediting all customers” — but did not provide further details.
There is “no indication” the outage is due to a cyberattack, according to a statement from Canada’s electronic spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment.
The U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Cloudflare agreed with that assessment, saying in a in a blog post that the outage was likely “an internal error.”
Whatever the reason, the impact has been dramatic. Internet monitoring watchdog group Netblocks.org reported that total internet traffic in Canada was at 75 per cent of its normal level on Friday morning.
Rogers-owned flanker brands like Fido and Chatr also went offline, as did services not directly controlled by Rogers, such as emergency services, travel and financial networks.
‘At this point, I think we can reassure Canadians that this is not a cyberattack,’ said Parliamentary Secretary Greg Fergus of Rogers’ Canada-wide outage, citing early analysis from the Communications Security Establishment.
Debit payment services have also been interrupted.
“A nationwide telecommunications outage with a network provider … is impacting the availability of some Interac services,” a spokesperson for Interac confirmed to CBC News.
“Debit is currently unavailable online and at checkout. Interac e-transfer is also widely unavailable, impacting the ability to send and receive payments.”
Bell confirmed that it is having no issues on its network, although it says customers are having difficulties connecting to anything on a Rogers network.
“The Bell network is operational and calls and texts between Bell customers or to other providers are not impacted,” the company said on Twitter.
Telus networks were also working normally.
CBC’s radio station in Kitchener, Ont., went offline and off the air as a result of the outage.
Spoke to the CEO of Rogers. Shared with him the frustration of millions of Canadians.<br><br>Also spoke w/ the CEOs of both Bell and Telus. Everyone is in solution mode, willing to help.<br><br>This unacceptable situation is why quality, diversity & reliability are key to our telecom network
—@FP_Champagne
The Toronto Police Service tweeted that Rogers customers in that city were having trouble connecting to 911, but stressed that the 911 service itself was working properly, as long as people weren’t calling from a Rogers-affiliated device.
“We are working to resolve these issues,” the force said.
Other emergency services reported a similar status.
“Although Rogers is experiencing a nationwide outage, our tests have shown 911 is still working,” a spokesperson for the Fredericton Police Service told CBC News.
Officials in Winnipeg and Vancouver also stressed that emergency services are operational, but people on the Rogers network can’t seem to access them.
Under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rules in place since 2017, telecom networks are supposed to ensure that cellphones are able to contact 911 even if they do not have service.
Canada’s telecom regulator did not immediately reply to a request from CBC News as to whether the 911 problems seen Friday are in breach of those rules. In a tweet, the CRTC said it also doesn’t have reliable phone service due to the Rogers outage.
Rogers customers were caught off guard by Friday’s massive outage involving both mobile and internet networks, which also caused widespread disruption for banks, businesses and some emergency services across Canada.
Outage ‘incomprehensible’
They aren’t the only ones. Ordinary Canadians told CBC News on Friday that the outage is unacceptable.
“This can’t happen again without changes being made,” said Torontonian Andrew Revai. “People can tweet all the memes they want about losing connectivity but how will Rogers keep this from happening again?”
Ottawa resident Robert Hubscher said “it’s incomprehensible” that a company as big as Rogers could have an outage this widespread for this long.
He uses Rogers for his cellphone and home internet, and said he’s glad he has some services with other companies to maintain connections right now.
“It’s a little scary that the regulatory bodies are not looking at this more seriously,” Hubscher said.
Government services including already bottlenecked passport offices, Service Canada, Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency are also affected.
Ben Klass says the Rogers outage is another lesson in why Canada’s telecom regulations need to be completely changed to ensure that consumers and businesses can rely on them when they are needed most.
The Canada Border Services Agency says the ArriveCan app is disabled because of the outage, so anyone arriving in Canada must have a paper copy of their vaccination status.
Telecom analyst Vince Valentini with TD Bank, who covers Rogers, says it’s not good for the company’s reputation to have an outage of this scale, especially since it seems to be across all of its services, from internet to wireless.
“The longer this situation lasts, we believe there could be minor risks to customer churn,” he said. “And also there could be credibility issues for Rogers in the future as it attempts to ramp up sales.”
It’s the second time in as many years that Rogers has been rocked by a major outage, as the company’s wireless and cable networks went down in a similar fashion in April 2021. At the time, Rogers blamed an issue with a software update at one of its telecom equipment suppliers.
That time, the company offered customers rebates for their services, which ended up working out to a few dollars per customer. If the same metric is applied this time, Valentini says the company could be on the hook for about $28 million in rebates.
Technology analyst Ritesh Kotak says he suspects the cause of the outage is “an update gone wrong” in one of Rogers’ internal systems.
Regardless of why, Kotak says it underscores how vulnerable Canada’s economy is to outages like this, and says he makes sure all his telecom services come from different providers for this exact reason.
“It shows just how reliant we are on this technology,” he said in an interview. “From some government services … to working from home, all that has literally been shut down.”
Vass Bednar, executive director of of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in digital society program, says the outage underlines a long-simmering problem with Canada’s telecom network, which is that both the infrastructure and the services themselves are owned by private companies.
That’s not the case everywhere in the world, where private sector players control one or the other, and often compete with a public option.
“The internet and cellular services … seem like a public good,” she told CBC News. “They seem like critical digital infrastructure that we all need to use, and yet they are privately owned and operated.”
“Maybe it’s time for Canadians to seriously rethink that.”
News
We're still stockpiling reusable bags. Big grocers have adopted solutions, but experts have concerns – CBC News
Canada’s plastic bag ban has had an unintended consequence: a proliferation of reusable bags piling up in basements, closets and, eventually, landfills.
“They’re everywhere,” said environmental researcher Tony Walker. “We’re drowning in them, and we shouldn’t be.”
To combat the problem, several of Canada’s big grocers have introduced solutions. Last week, Walmart launched a free national recycling pilot program for the retailer’s reusable blue bags. Competitors Sobeys and chains owned by Loblaw Companies Ltd. use recyclable paper bags for grocery delivery.
But some environmental experts argue that paper bags are also problematic and that the best solutions are those that help customers actually reuse their reusable bags.
“We just can’t keep giving [them] out,” said Walker, a professor at Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies in Halifax. “We’re only meant to have a few of them, and we’re meant to use them until they fall apart.”
In late 2022, the federal government rolled out a ban on the manufacture, import and sale of several single-use plastics, including checkout bags. The regulations are being contested in court, but in the meantime, they remain in effect.
The regulations have made single-use shopping bags scarce in Canada, but they’ve also led to the proliferation of reusable bags, especially for grocery delivery.
“It just creates more waste, which is what we’re trying to avoid in the first place,” Walmart customer Udi Sela said in a CBC News interview in late 2022.
At the time, Sela, who lives in Maple, Ont., estimated his family had acquired about 300 reusable Walmart bags via grocery delivery.
“We can’t return them, we can’t do much with them.”
Now, a little more than a year later, Walmart has launched a pilot project to address the problem.
It allows customers to pack up their unwanted reusable Walmart blue bags and ship them — at no charge — to a facility where they’ll get a second life.
How it works
According to Walmart, bags in good condition will be laundered and donated to charity, primarily Food Banks Canada. Damaged bags will get recycled into other materials. Reusable bags typically can’t go in blue bins because they’re costly and difficult to recycle.
Customers must sign up for Walmart’s program, and enrolment is limited.
Jennifer Barbazza, Walmart’s senior manager of sustainability, said the retailer will fine-tune the details as the program progresses.
“[We] know that some customers have more reusable bags than maybe they need,” she said. “One of the things that we’re really excited to learn about from the pilot is customer acceptance and customer feedback.”
Reusable bags are living rent free in closets and car trunks across the country. Most major retailers made the switch away from single-use plastic bags about a year ago, but it’s taking time for some customers to catch on. They’re forgetting to bring their bags with them, and buying more every week.
Udi Sela has already signed up.
“I definitely think it’s a step in the right direction,” he said in an interview on Friday. “It’s something that needed to be done a while ago. God knows we’ve got a ton of bags kind of piled up.”
He said he’s concerned that some customers may find mailing the bags a hurdle. However, it’s not deterring Sela, who soon plans to ship hundreds.
Passing the buck?
Not everyone is keen on Walmart’s project. Emily Alfred, a waste campaigner with Toronto Environmental Alliance, said donating the bags to the food bank is just passing on the problem.
“We need to remove waste from the system entirely, and just sending these somewhere else for someone else to deal with is not really a solution,” she said.
Alfred said a better option is a program Walmart piloted in Guelph, Ont., in 2022. For a fee, customers could check out reusable bags from an in-store kiosk and later return them to be cleaned and reused.
“That’s a real circular reuse system,” she said.
Walmart’s Barbazza said the retailer is continuing to explore different reusable bag programs, including ones placed in stores.
She also said she’s confident Canada’s food banks will make good use of the bags.
“There’s definitely a need for sturdy items to distribute materials to the food bank clients.”
The paper problem
Among Canada’s major grocers, only Walmart offers a reusable bag program for all customers.
Loblaw recently switched from reusable to recyclable paper bags for grocery delivery. Sobeys did not respond to requests for comment, but according to its website, the grocer also uses paper bags and “reusable options” for home delivery.
Several environmental experts say paper bags aren’t a good solution, because their production leaves a sizable carbon footprint.
“Paper bags are a problem,” Alfred said. “It takes a lot of energy to recycle paper, takes a lot of trees and energy to make new paper.”
Loblaw said it continues to explore a variety of more sustainable solutions. “It’s a challenge we’re committed to addressing,” spokesperson Dave Bauer said in an email.
Both Walker and Alfred applaud Metro for its grocery delivery program, because the grocer, which operates in Ontario and Quebec, reuses delivery materials.
Metro said customers can get their goods delivered in a cardboard box or reusable bags, which can be returned and used for another delivery. Or customers can opt for a plastic bin and remove their groceries from it upon arrival.
Metro does not offer similar programs for in-store shoppers.
Alfred said the federal government should introduce regulations that mandate retailers adopt effective reusable bag programs for all customers.
“It’s up to our governments and people to demand that these companies do better,” she said.
But Walker suggested that the regulations would be hard to enforce and that incentives could be a better tactic.
For example, if retailers increased the price of reusable bags, shoppers might be less likely to forget them when they head to the store, he said.
“When the cost is a disincentive to do an activity, people change their behaviour.”
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Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says she thinks unhappy premiers will come around on measures in the federal budget that touch on provincial legislation, even as they push back.
At an event in Toronto on Sunday, Freeland — who presented the federal budget on Tuesday — said the national government needs to push ahead on such issues as housing and she was “extremely optimistic” premiers would choose to co-operate.
“Housing is a national challenge, and the federal government needs to be leading the charge,” she said.
“My own experience has been when there are big issues that really matter to Canadians, after all the sound and the fury, people are prepared to roll up their sleeves and find a win-win outcome for Canadians.”
Several premiers have pushed back against the federal government in recent months and again after the budget was released on the grounds that some measures touch on provincial jurisdiction.
This week’s federal budget has premiers lashing out at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over a planned increase to capital gains taxes as well as what they say is overstepping on infrastructure and pharmacare.
In a letter released Friday by the Council of the Federation, which represents the leaders of all 13 provinces and territories, the premiers said Ottawa should have consulted them more ahead of the budget.
Individual premiers have shared more pointed critiques.
“It’s a never-ending spending platform that we’ve seen now for the last 10 years,” New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs said on CBC’s Power & Politics on Friday.
“My initial thoughts about the federal budget are that they are overtaxing, overspending, overborrowing and over interfering in provincial affairs,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said earlier this week.
Alberta has clashed with the government repeatedly over housing. Smith introduced legislation earlier this month that would require provincial oversight of deals made between municipalities and the federal government, including for future agreements around federal housing funds.
At Issue this week: The Liberals work to sell their multibillion-dollar spending plan and capital gains tax hike. Pierre Poilievre tells Radio-Canada what he thinks of the federal budget. And another province pushes back on the carbon tax.
Freeland said on Sunday that, as an example, the federal child-care program negotiated through a series of deals with provinces and territories showed that co-operation was possible.
Capital gains tax changes criticized
The federal government has also faced some opposition on what was perhaps the most prominent measure revealed on budget day: changes to Canada’s capital gains tax rules. The government has proposed raising the inclusion rate to 67 per cent on capital gains above $250,000 for individuals.
“The 21st-century winner-takes-all-economy is making those at the very top richer, while too many middle-class Canadians are struggling,” Freeland said Sunday, adding the government was asking wealthy Canadians to pay their “fair share.”
“We do need to ensure that we have some revenue coming in. This is a very limited way of ensuring that that occurs,” Treasury Board President Anita Anand said in an interview on Rosemary Barton Live on Sunday.
Treasury Board President Anita Anand joins CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton to talk about the federal budget and its focus on young Canadians — as well as the criticism it’s receiving.
Critics have raised concerns that the changes could result in reduced investment or capital flight.
“The big concern right now … is this going to have a detrimental impact to the progress we’re trying to make in making Canada a hub for innovation,” said Kirk Simpson, CEO of the tech company goConfirm, in a separate interview on Rosemary Barton Live.
“With productivity the way that it is, we want more capital, not less, flowing into business innovation,” Simpson told CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton.
Freeland said Sunday that the changes will affect very few Canadian individuals — the government estimates 0.13 per cent — and the revenue will go to pay for investments in areas like housing.
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