After disrupting banking, calls, cashless payments and even police, the company said a major outage affecting mobile and internet networks at Canada’s leading telecoms provider was easing late Friday.
Telecom company Rogers reported on the latest advances, saying that “wireless services are starting to recover.”
According to AFP data from Netblox, an internet monitoring group, a quarter of Canada’s internet connections are “down”.
Rogers is Canada’s largest wireless operator with more than 11 million wireless subscribers and nearly three million internet users – with Bell Inc. and Telus Corp. together control about 90 percent of the mobile communications market.
It was not immediately clear what caused the failure.
Ivan Koronowski, a spokesman for the Communications Security Establishment, a government agency responsible for cybersecurity and signals intelligence, told AFP that “CSE currently has no evidence that this is related to any malicious cyberthreats.”
Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said he spoke to Rogers’ CEO and shared the “disappointment of millions of Canadians”.
“It is an unacceptable position that quality, diversity and reliability are critical to our telecommunications network,” Champagne said on Twitter.
Police in several cities, including Canada’s largest metropolis – the capital Ottawa and Toronto – have warned people are unable to call 911 in emergencies due to power outages.
The City of Montreal also said its municipal service line was down.
Across the country, Rogers customers complained that they couldn’t make calls or use the internet.
Several major banks announced that money transfers and cashless payments cannot be processed. ATM withdrawals, telephone and online banking were also affected.
The Royal Bank of Canada tweeted that the outage was affecting “all financial institutions” in the country.
Cafes and retailers in many city centers have put up signs saying they accept “cash only” for purchases.
And the Canada Border Services Agency tweeted that arriving travelers would have to use paper forms to provide mandatory travel and health information as their mobile app was impacted by the outage.
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