Despite the telco giant saying the “vast majority” of its customers have had their service restored, many are still without a full connection. “Yeah, I’m disappointed,” said Kanata resident John Hansen. His cellphone service was restored late Friday, but as of early Saturday, Hansen was still without Internet access. “I’m glad I had an over-the-air TV antenna so I could at least watch TV that way. It makes you think about what you’re going to do as a backup for the internet, like when the power fails.” As of Saturday morning, Rogers said service had been restored for the “vast majority” of its customers, and the company gave the following explanation for what happened. “We narrowed down the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update late Thursday night, early Friday morning,” said Rogers president and CEO Tony Staffieri. “These are usually very common updates to our core network. This update caused some of the routers in our system to malfunction, and this malfunction caused traffic to become overloaded, and as a result, the entire system just shut down.” While service returned for many to start the weekend, it did not come without challenges. “Yesterday was definitely a nightmare,” said Ottawa resident Sally Thomas, who was without service Friday. She said for people with disabilities like herself, the impact has been significant. She couldn’t contact her assistant and struggled to book a ride with Para Transpo. “Thousands of people with disabilities are negatively impacted when they can’t contact caregivers, can’t call 911, can’t call Para Transpo, the list goes on.” And businesses were left to clean up the mess. Preston Hardware spent Saturday morning charging purchases made on Friday. “Our credit machines were down, the cash registers were working but cash only, so to make it convenient for our customers, we took their credit cards and processed them this morning,” said Robbie Ibrahim, the store manager. . The outage was an inconvenience for millions, and still is for some, but Rogers promises they won’t call it quits, the company plans to invest more money to prevent it from happening again. “So that they can rely on and regain their trust in the Rogers network,” Staffieri said.
