Canada Internet Outage! No Net in one of world’s richest countries

Canada has been hit by a major internet and mobile outage! This happened on Friday when Rogers Communications Inc’s mobile and internet networks crashed causing widespread disruptions across the country, a Reuters report said. The internet and mobile network blackout affected banking services, passport officers and even the country’s ArriveCAN app, which is basically used for border control. Some people couldn’t even reach the emergency services via 911 calls, the report said, citing Canada Police.

Almost every facet of life was put on hold by the outage affecting the internet, mobile as well as landline phone connections. In the absence of internet services, several Canadians flocked to some cafes and public libraries that had internet access to catch a signal. People started crowding outside the hotels to get some network. From mobile apps handling the border services to cashless pay systems, banks and ATMs, almost everything was affected by the outage. The telecom company Rogers Communication confirmed the outages that affected the wireless and wireline networks.

Tony Staffieri, President and CEO at Rogers said in a statement on its website, “As you know, we experienced a network outage across both wireless and wireline service that began early this morning.” He further confirmed about working towards fixing the issue, “We have made meaningful progress towards bringing our networks back online and many of our wireless customers are starting to see services return. We don’t yet have an ETA on when our networks will be fully restored but we will continue to share information with our customers as we restore full service.”

However, later in the evening, the telecom company said that the network was beginning to recover after a 19-hour service outage. Though, it is still not known what caused this major outage of internet and mobile services, which is the second one in 15 months. “We know how important it is for our customers to stay connected,” Rogers mentioned in a statement.

The NetBlocks monitoring group confirmed that the internet outage began around 4:30 a.m. ET (0830 GMT) that knocked out a quarter of Canada’s observable internet connections.