Rogers: Network Outage Blamed on Signaling Traffic Surge, Not Outside Attack [u]

It’s been about 24 hours after Rogers suffered one of their worst widespread cell network outages which crippled voice and text message service yesterday for the majority of customers yesterday, but data service remained unaffected.

The company sent the following statement via email to further explain the cause of the outage, which was blamed on a surge of signalling traffic and not some sort of outside attack:

“This was not the result of an outside attack. We are investigating to find the root cause.

We experienced an unprecedented surge in our signaling traffic and this temporarily overloaded our mobile switches which didn’t properly manage the spike creating a service disruption. We worked diligently with our outside suppliers who developed a software fix, to change how the switches manage a signaling surge, and to prevent the issue from happening again.”

Late last night the company’s CEO Nadir Mohamed issued an apology to users for the downtime and issued a one day service credit for postpaid customers, only to later say it would investigate how to also include prepaid customers as well.

Update: Looks like Rogers has decided to credit prepaid customers as well, based on the following tweet from Fido:

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