Millions of people were affected on Friday when Rogers, one of Canada’s largest mobile and internet providers, suffered a prolonged outage.
The outage began at about 0430 local time and lasted for around 15 hours. Overall internet traffic fell by 25% with very widespread impacts including:
- Disruption to emergency services;
- Loss of ATMs and problems with debit card payments;
- Cancellation of events; and
- A delay to the high-profile trial of Peter Nygard!
Rogers have stressed that the outage was the result of a “maintenance” issue, not any form of cyber-attack. However, the significant impacts of this outage have focused attention on our ever increasing reliance on internet connectivity. Within Canada, it has also reignited the debate about the wisdom of allowing three providers to dominate the telecoms market with a combined 90% market share.
