Industry minister to meet with Rogers CEO

Canada's industry minister will meet with the head of Rogers Communications today in the wake of last week's massive outage that paralyzed the company's network.

The office of François-Philippe Champagne says he plans to meet with Tony Staffieri and other telecom leaders to discuss the importance of improving Canada's networks.

The widespread Rogers service outage began on Friday morning and lasted at least 15 hours, knocking out access to many health-care, law enforcement and banking services.

The statement from Champagne's office says the minister found the disruption "unacceptable," describing the services as "vitally important" in the daily lives of Canadians.

Spoke to the CEO of Rogers. Shared with him the frustration of millions of Canadians.

Also spoke w/ the CEOs of both Bell and Telus. Everyone is in solution mode, willing to help.

This unacceptable situation is why quality, diversity & reliability are key to our telecom network

— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) 🇨🇦 (@FP_Champagne) July 8, 2022

Staffieri has made a statement attributing the outage to a network system failure after a maintenance update, adding that the "vast majority" of customers were back online.

But many customers reported service disruptions stretching into Sunday, and Rogers issued a statement acknowledging some were still experiencing service disruptions it described as intermittent.