Rogers Goes Down and Out

Rogers customers lose service for several hours

By Ocean-Leigh Peters, Staff Writer

Rogers is crediting their customers with one day of service after their wireless phone system went down for more than 12 hours. Millions of customers were left without cell service across Canada.

At first Rogers Tweeted that there were only issues with voice service in Ontario and Quebec, but it soon spread across the country.

Rogers customers lost their cell phone service around 6:30 p.m. on October 9th. Some customers say they were still able to receive text message but, couldn’t send them. Others say they were still able to use their internet services on their phone, but not make any calls.

Rogers’ CEO, Nadir Mohamed, responds to the outage on the Rogers website by acknowledging that the outage is unacceptable for Rogers customers.

Jennifer Kett, a spokesperson from Rogers, says they’re still working on finding the source of the issue.

Finding out what happened may not be that easy. There are many different things that could have caused the outage.

Mark Golberg is a telecom consultant in Toronto, and he remarks that it’s hard to tell what the problem is when there’s an outage of this size across the country.

He says the root of the outage could be anything from a software glitch to a damaged fibre-optic cable.

Patricia Trott, a spokesperson for Rogers, says that they are going to keep looking into what happened, so they can prevent it occurring again in the future.

Ocean-Leigh is an aspiring journalist and a resent UNBSJ graduate who will be attending UKC in Halifax to study journalism in the fall. She’s passionate about writing and got her start writing a sports column for her university paper. You can follow her on Twitter @ocean_leigh