A total of 16 hours with no cell phone, no internet and no TV with little to no information on Rogers on what happened. In my not-so-humble opinion that is not acceptable as this is the second outage in about 15 months for Rogers. The start of the outage should have triggered an near immediate BR/DR response and seeing the first update at around 09:00 indicates that someone was sleeping at the switch or hoping things would get better.
Being fair? Hell no! They are supposed to be a national provider and provide critical telecommunications and any failure should be short and not this long. First update was around 09:00 and just the standard tweet with absolutely no information. Updates (what few there were) regurgitated the same marketing drivel.
Hopefully our elected representatives and or the CRTC will demand an report on:
- What happened? Was this a failed upgrade, failed major piece of infrastructure or a nation state attack on our systems (not likely)?
- Who knew the system was failing or failed and when?
- What was the timeline before invoking the BR/DR plans (if it was)?
- Who was supposed to be informed and when were they? Don't need names, just roles.
- What plans are being made to minimize what happened so it doesn't happen in the future?
- Will those of us who paid for service get a credit for the loss of service?
Too much is now dependent on cell and internet service to be offline (ATM, 911, government services, medical services to name just a few). Fortunately I was able to commute to work and complete my work there (they use Bell), but, too many cannot do so and at night I had to depend on a co-worker acting as the on-call person instead of me as I had no internet.
Update 2022/07/15:
Looks like the CRTC and others are looking at this outage. I hope they do a real job and have recommendations to minimize this happening in the future. Once that is out of the way they should be doing the same for all other telecommunication providers.
