This Guy Suffered from the Rogers Outage and He’s Not Even a Customer

During yesterday’s Rogers cell network outage, one man suffered the most from the downtime. The worst part? He’s not even a Rogers customer.

Glenn Rogers is an Aussie living in Brooklyn in New York who happens to have the Twitter handle @Rogers. So whenever there is an outage or issue–he’s always the first to know, he tells CTV News:

“I think I might have known (about the outage) before Rogers did,”

“It started with nasty messages for the first few hours and then people started figuring out what was going on here,” he said.

“I had just as much support from people who were happy to help redirect traffic (to the company).”

Last night, during the peak of the downtime, Rogers tweeted “The wrath of a thousand Canadians is a mighty sight”:

Apologies dude “@rogers: The wrath of a thousand Canadians is a mighty sight. #rogersoutage”

— iPhone in Canada (@iphoneincanada) October 10, 2013

This morning he went on to thank the kind Canadians who tweeted him support opposed to angry messages:

Thanks for all the kind tweets Canada. May they never take your phone or internet from you again. #rogersoutage

— Glenn Rogers (@rogers) October 10, 2013

Rogers says his phone was buzzing for two hours before the battery died and when he later powered it back on, more angry tweets had come his way. He says he’s been bombarded with angry Rogers network tweets before but “never to this scale.”

Rogers was able to acquire his Twitter handle before the wireless carrier started on Twitter. He said Rogers Communications approached him years back about acquiring his username but he hasn’t heard from them since. At the time he believed it was “quite an odd request.”

The official Rogers twitter account is @RogersHelps. This afternoon the company said the root cause of the outage is still being investigated but it wasn’t due to an outside attack, rather a signalling traffic surge.