UPDATED: Rogers outage caused by a cyber attack?

For hapless Canucks, Friday the 8th turned out to be even more distressing than Friday the 13th. The "Please stand by" graphic Ed. posted on the 7th turned out to be oddly premonitory, as Canadians struggled to cope with a massive disruption of mobile and internet "service" provided by Rogers (aka "Robbers") Communications.

Canada's telecoms market is dominated by just three "service providers". [You understand why Walt is using quote marks, right? Ed.] -- Bell, Rogers and Telus. Knocking out their networks disrupts not just mobile phone calls, but money transfers (Interac, using debit cards), data exchange (problems for airlines, pharmacies, banks, etc), wi-fi (disastrous for those working from home) and even 9-1-1 service. 

But that's what happened yesterday, as Robbers customers  found themselves unconnected for most of the day. Last night, the company said it had restored mobile and internet service for the "vast majority: of its customers. However, it added, some customers may experience delays in regaining full service as its network comes back online and traffic volumes return to normal. 

In a statement posted to the company's social media channels (which customers of other telecoms companies could read, one presumes), Rogers apologized for the disruption the outage has caused to its customers and said it "will be proactively crediting" all customers. Which means: don't call us asking for a refund, we're already doing it. 

Tony Staffieri, CEO of Rogers, said in an open letter that the company apologizes for the service interruption but offered no explanation for the outage or how many customers were affected. Staffieri says Rogers "is committed to understanding the cause and would make changes to meet and exceed expectations in the future."

As of this morning, Rogers still hasn't said what caused their service to go down. Mr Staffieri said they would investigate "the root cause of this outage." Walt humbly suggests they read "FBI director calls China 'biggest' US threat; authorities warn of North Korean cyber attacks", posted on ABC News on July 6th.

The story quotes FBI Director Christopher Wray as saying the Chinese government (not those nice Chinese people, especially immigrants) is set on stealing our technology. Speaking alongside his British counterpart in London on Wednesday, Mr Wray called China the "biggest long-term threat" to both the US and the UK. (He didn't mention Canada because, no matter what Justin Trudeau says, Canada's not important.) 

"The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology -- whatever it is that makes your industry tick -- and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market," said Mr Wray, adding, "They're set on using every tool at their disposal to do it." 

Canada's telecoms, including Rogers, already use Huawei equipment, although M Trudeau (a great admirer of the ChiComms' ability "to get things done") now says they won't be allowing any new Huawei 5-G technology to be used in Canadian networks. Is it possible the Chinese (or North Koreans) hacked the Rogers network as a test, to see how easy it would be to throw a country into confusion and chaos? Just askin'....

UPDATE ADDED 10/7/22: Rogers Communications Inc. says it believes the massive system outage it suffered on Friday occurred after a maintenance update to its core network, but critics are unimpressed with the explanation after the telecom’s second major service interruption in two years.

This critic -- yr obdt svt -- wonders if Rogers would say anything different, if the massive outage had indeed been caused by hackers working for a hostile foreign government, which they (Rogers) did  not expect and could not control. Given the panic that would likely have ensured had they admitted such a huge security breach, would they not have said, "Oopsy. Our problem. We fixed it. Nothing to see here." Just askin'....