Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest cellular and internet providers experienced a 15-hour nationwide outage on July 8th, 2022. The outage impacted internet and cellular service throughout Canada. Company CEO Tony Staffieri attributed the failure to a maintenance update the company implemented in its core network. The outage was estimated to have impacted a quarter of all internet traffic in Canada during the peak of the outage.
In addition to people not being able to use their cell phones or the internet, the outage had a huge effect on a wide range of services across Canada including ATM machines and emergency services. Many 911 services reported difficulties with incoming calls and hospitals asked on-call staff to come into work until the issue was resolved. Emergency response services were also impacted as many ambulance services have come to rely on cell phones and internet connections to dispatch ambulances.
Rogers has about 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers across Canada and is one of 3 major network and cellular companies in the country. The outage has led to calls on the Canadian government to increase network reliability and resist consolidation trends in the wireless/network industry.
The outage highlights the need for resiliency planning as a key part of a healthcare system’s emergency communications planning and understanding of how dependent we are on these systems of systems to provide daily services.
For more on Resiliency and Systems Thinking see the PUSHECS website.
https://pushecs.org/resources/ideas_concepts/resiliency_planning/
https://pushecs.org/resources/ideas_concepts/resiliency_planning/system_of_systems/
External references on Rogers outage.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62110358
https://urgentcomm.com/2022/07/15/canada-seeks-answers-after-rogers-outage/