Rogers Senior Vice President Kye Prigg went on CBC’s Power & Politics to answer tough questions about today’s ongoing Rogers network outage.
According to Prigg, when asked how many customers were affected by the Canada-wide out, he said there were “millions coast-to-coast on wireless and wireline and enterprise” impacted. Prigg was taking the interview from the Rogers network operations centre.
Prigg was unable to give an ETA on when the Rogers network would be fixed. He did not answer if it would be fixed by today, only saying Rogers was investigating the root cause of the failure, saying they were “very close” to understanding what went wrong.
Wearing a headset and a Rogers lanyard, Prigg just said the company was “working very hard on this”, saying there were some good signs in bringing the network back online but there is no full ETA on when services would be back online.
Rogers does not know what the root cause was when asked if it was a cyberattack by CBC News. The company said it was too early to speculate on what caused the outage.
Check out the video below:
"As of now, we don't have an ETA of when the problem will be fixed," says Rogers Senior Vice President Kye Prigg of the company's nationwide network outage. "I wouldn't like to say whether it's going to be fully online today or not." pic.twitter.com/mHbjk5x6Na
— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) July 8, 2022
When asked why there were no failsafes to prevent a nationwide outage, Rogers said redundancies are in place, but the company says they are not sure why levels of backups are not working coast-to-coast.
Prigg said “it’s a frustrating interview”, when asked if he was having a frustrating day. He then cut the interview short to say he had to depart to continue fixing the problem.
“As soon as we can, we will have things running again,” said Prigg, noting the priority was getting mobile networks online first.
Rogers said earlier this afternoon it would be crediting customers due to today’s ongoing outage.
Last April, Rogers also suffered a daylong wireless outage, blamed on partner Ericsson performing a network upgrade.
The Rogers network being down is impacting the entire INTERAC network for debit and e-Transfers, plus also affecting the ArriveCAN app for travellers coming into Canada, along with some 9-1-1 services.
As of Roger’s Q1 2022, the company has 8.91 million postpaid wireless and 1.15 million prepaid wireless customers, including customers from Fido, Chatr and other subsidiaries such as Zoomer and Cityfone.
