'It was definitely chaotic': Rogers services restored for many following network outage

On Friday, the world halted for Rogers customers when the company experienced a nation-wide outage.

The Rogers network outage affected several mobile and internet services, banks, debit purchases, passport offices, and Canada's ArriveCAN app.

Rogers reported that services have been restored for the majority of its customers as of Saturday.

Many working from home fled to the closest coffee shop to reconnect.

“It was definitely chaotic when we got here in the morning,” said Samantha Farquhar, the manager of Sidetrack: a Wortley Café.

Farquhar told CTV News they managed throughout the day while using the hotspot on one of their cellphones.

“A lot of people were coming in because they were saying ‘my internet is down,” she said. “They were working from home or whatever the case was. We had an increase of people who were looking for something to do.”

After a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19, Sunfest vendors found themselves in a challenging situation when some could only accept cash or interact.

“The ATM machines were down and of course, all the vendors were affected because transactions couldn't be done,” said Alfredo Caxaj, the artistic director.

“Some were struggling to find cash… so it was very challenging. But we survived.”

Many are breathing a sigh of relief on Saturday to see service back up and running

Rogers has apologized for the inconvenience the outage caused and said it will be crediting all customers. 

“If one company goes down and it impacts 911, banking systems, video conferencing — the impact from coast to coast,” said tech and cybersecurity analyst Ritesh Kotak. “Clearly something is broken and we need to really think about how we’re going to remedy this.

The tech analyst says a back-up plan should have been in place, as the outage impacted Canadians across the country.

It just goes to show they didn’t have a roll-back plan, did they have redundancies that if something like this happens that they have some business continuity?” Kotak said.

While this is not the first time Rogers has experienced a Canada-wide disruption, many are hoping it will be the last as customers are relieved to have their service back up and running.