CRTC posts independent report on Rogers outage, says company made necessary changes

An independent report into the 2022 Rogers outage says the company lacked several protections and redundancies that could have either prevented the outage or ended it sooner.

The report delivered to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission says that since the outage, the telecom company has implemented the changes needed to address the cause of the outage and improve network resiliency and reliability.

In a separate letter posted to its website Thursday, the CRTC confirmed that Rogers has also implemented all the report’s additional recommendations.

The report says an error by Rogers staff during the sixth phase of a seven-part network upgrade process caused a flood of data to the core network routers, which crashed.

Once the outage occurred, the report says it was prolonged in part because Rogers staff didn’t have backup connectivity from alternative service providers, and so they couldn’t communicate with each other.

The outage in the early morning of July 8 two years ago lasted more than 24 hours and affected more than 12 million customers.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 5, 2024.