A recent nationwide outage at Rogers Communications not only took out Internet and cell phone service for their Canadian customers, but also exposed the vulnerability of emergency services. Described by Rogers Communications as being due to a “network service failure following a maintenance update,” the outage left first responders scrambling to re-establish communication and find workaround for tools that relied on phone or Internet access.
“We knew something was up fairly early in the morning when things weren’t necessarily connecting as we would expect to them. Like any Code Grey, the priority is to figure out what is working as normal and what might be impacted. What are all those core systems? We were able to fairly quickly establish [connection] to the main health information system we use,” said Robert Bull, vice-president of facilities, IT, and CFO of Southlake Regional Health Centre, of the outage to Newmarket Today. “Things within the building were generally working as they should be expected to. Our internal networks were all working. It was when we needed things to connect to the outside world that it was intermittent depending on what the system was.”
The outage will be the subject of a series of meetings between Rogers and the House of Commons industry committee to examine the cause of the outage and plans to avoid similar incidents in the future, according to Global News.
Since the outage, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri has issued a statement “We’re particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority.”
Source:
https://globalnews.ca/news/8992261/rogers-outage-investigation-committee-meeting/
