Rogers, Fido, Chatr Outage Likely Caused by Internal Error Says Cloudflare

CleanShot 2022 07 08 at 12 06 35

The Rogers network outage also affecting Fido and Chatr continues to impact customers nationwide. Now, we have an explanation from content delivery network Cloudflare on what it believes caused the Rogers network outage.

Cloudflare says it noticed a “near complete loss of traffic” from Roger’s autonomous system, or group of networks, AS812, at roughly 1:45am PDT/4:45am EDT on Friday.

“At the time of writing, we are seeing a very small amount of traffic from Rogers, but we are only seeing residual traffic, and nothing close to a full recovery to normal traffic levels,” said Cloudflare.

So what is causing the Rogers network outage? A cyberattack? According to Cloudflare it says this is likely “to be an internal error” and not some sort of nefarious attack, based on what they’re seeing and observed in the past.

Now, Cloudflare gets technical about what happened at Rogers.

“Cloudflare data shows that there was a clear spike in BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates after 08:15, reaching its peak at 08:45,” or 1:45am PDT/4:45am EDT.

“BGP is a mechanism to exchange routing information between networks on the Internet. The big routers that make the Internet work have huge, constantly updated lists of the possible routes that can be used to deliver each network packet to its final destination. Without BGP, the Internet routers wouldn’t know what to do, and the Internet wouldn’t exist,” explains Cloudflare.

“BGP allows one network (say Rogers) to advertise its presence to other networks that form the Internet. Rogers is not advertising its presence, so other networks can’t find Roger’s network and so it is unavailable,” writes Cloudflare’s João Tomé, Tom Strickx and Mingwei Zhang.

“A BGP update message informs a router of changes made to a prefix (a group of IP addresses) advertisement or entirely withdraws the prefix. In this next chart, we can see that at 08:45 there was a withdrawal of prefixes from Roger’s ASN,” says Cloudflare.

At 7:30am PDT/10:30am EDT, Rogers tried to advertise their BGP again, says Cloudflare, showing the slow start of recovery shortly afterwards, after a short outage thereafter in attempts to bring back services.

Are you seeing Rogers internet and wireless service restored yet?

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