Rogers ("Canadas Largest Network" goes down)

[sXeth]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-outage-cell-mobile-wifi-1.6514373

To be fair, while its definitely an obnoxious situations, the headlines have blown it up a tad more in terms of how many areas are affected. Its primarily chunks of Ontario and Quebec and apparently part of BC.


But yeah, the biggest provider of cable, internet, and phone service has had a 17 hour outage with no ETA yet here. Although my cell phone on their network has been running for about 5 hours now (I also keep a backup flip phone with prepaid cards for another network).


The broader impact seems to be that Interac (a debit and online payment provider that is in itself, an actual monopoly here as far as I know) is contracted with Rogers, and the outage has disabled every debit machine and most ATMs in the country (in our pandemic society where carrying cash hasn't been a common thing in like 2 years). Rendering thousands of businesses dead in the water, even if they have their own separate ISPs.


Also seemingly a ton of government offices run on Rogers as well, effectively paralyzing whole branches. And to some extent 911 services (I think thats a case where they operate on multiple providers, but the load from 30-50% lines being down is causing prolbems)

 

[Gergar12]

Is this already happening?

 

[tstorm823]

Is this already happening?

No, that's clickbait

 

[EvilRoy]

Yeah my day got mildly fucked by that yesterday. I live out in Alberta, but as you said this killed debit service basically everywhere, leaving Mastercard and, sometimes, Visa. Don't ask what the distinction is there, I don't know why beyond the fact that I was able to pay for parking and a coffee with a Visa, but a car rental couldn't be processed on Visa.

This kind of thing is why I'm really worried about attempts by Rogers to purchase Shaw, or the attempt to run off smaller ISPs in Canada by the big dogs. Like, if Rogers owns more stuff, more stuff goes down when they screw up. This actually happened roughly a year ago to a somewhat lesser extent, indicating that there's just a problem in the guts of Rogers that may periodically rear its head. Not necessarily the biggest of deal, except that if Rogers continues to expand then we can expect the impact of these issues to expand as well. I use a smaller ISP myself, so I'm protected to some extent, but I don't like finding out that a big chunk of multiple levels of government can just get shut down because they don't have any variation in their service providers.

Maybe this is another indication that internet service should be treated like a regulated utility. Slower reactivity to changes, but greater stability overall. I like my fast internet, but I would accept slower internet and less reactivity from customer service if it meant my tubes went down as often as my electricity - which is to say, almost never.

 

[sXeth]

Yeah my day got mildly fucked by that yesterday. I live out in Alberta, but as you said this killed debit service basically everywhere, leaving Mastercard and, sometimes, Visa. Don't ask what the distinction is there, I don't know why beyond the fact that I was able to pay for parking and a coffee with a Visa, but a car rental couldn't be processed on Visa.

This kind of thing is why I'm really worried about attempts by Rogers to purchase Shaw, or the attempt to run off smaller ISPs in Canada by the big dogs. Like, if Rogers owns more stuff, more stuff goes down when they screw up. This actually happened roughly a year ago to a somewhat lesser extent, indicating that there's just a problem in the guts of Rogers that may periodically rear its head. Not necessarily the biggest of deal, except that if Rogers continues to expand then we can expect the impact of these issues to expand as well. I use a smaller ISP myself, so I'm protected to some extent, but I don't like finding out that a big chunk of multiple levels of government can just get shut down because they don't have any variation in their service providers.

Maybe this is another indication that internet service should be treated like a regulated utility. Slower reactivity to changes, but greater stability overall. I like my fast internet, but I would accept slower internet and less reactivity from customer service if it meant my tubes went down as often as my electricity - which is to say, almost never.

I mean, my powers been out more then my internet in the last 5 years (excepting some occasions that overlapped, one of which was a 1/40 year nuclear-blast level wind storm).


For all the side-eyeing at Rogers, to which I give a bit myself in that this was apparently caused by internal router maintenance (which should have been identified quicker or less impactful or both). I'm eyeballing Interac more given they have something more resembling a monopoly. Like literally we say "Interac" instead of Debit up here.

 

[Kwak]

So, still down or fixed?

 

[Nielas]

So, still down or fixed?

Most stuff was up and running by Saturday morning though my internet service has been sluggish.

My workplace was not affected since we do not use Rogers but many of our clients were. Fortunately the clients who rely on an online presence were with Bell so were not affected.

I had to make an call to a friend on Friday evening but both my home phone and cell phone are on the Rogers network so I ended up just going back to the work office and using the phone there. Turns out my friend is also on the Rogers network so we did not talk till Saturday

I went out on Friday evening so I was not seriously inconvenienced by the outage. It was mildly amusing discovering that my elderly parents are more Internet dependent than I am.

 

[SilentPony]

Is this already happening?

Watched it, and this was interesting, but it doesn't really take into account the control the US government really has over the market. They learned from the 2008 crisis that the Government basically needs a "redo" button. Like that scene in Rick and Morty were Rick changes the universal currency from being worth one of itself to being worth zero of itself, the US government has that level of control. Lets say the market does being to crash, all those bots on Wallstreet start autoselling and its a financial crisis the likes of which we've never seen! The US government has the power to not only step in and shut down all trading, it can just undo the trades. It can just reset the financial world to a save-point from before a crash.
Now that won't necessarily work for China, unless the Chinese government just decides it has that power too.

 

[EvilRoy]

I mean, my powers been out more then my internet in the last 5 years (excepting some occasions that overlapped, one of which was a 1/40 year nuclear-blast level wind storm).


For all the side-eyeing at Rogers, to which I give a bit myself in that this was apparently caused by internal router maintenance (which should have been identified quicker or less impactful or both). I'm eyeballing Interac more given they have something more resembling a monopoly. Like literally we say "Interac" instead of Debit up here.

I guess I have the opposite situation - internet can be spotty pretty often where I'm at, but the last power outage that lasted longer than an hour was a few years ago now.

I know what you mean about interac, but honestly I'm not clear on what kind of entity they are in general. Are they like a private service provider that facilitates for banks, or do the banks own it as shared group for their own ends?

 

[sXeth]

I guess I have the opposite situation - internet can be spotty pretty often where I'm at, but the last power outage that lasted longer than an hour was a few years ago now.

I know what you mean about interac, but honestly I'm not clear on what kind of entity they are in general. Are they like a private service provider that facilitates for banks, or do the banks own it as shared group for their own ends?

The network was launched in 1984 through the nonprofit Interac Association, a cooperative venture between five financial institutions: RBC, CIBC, Scotiabank, TD, and Desjardins; by 2010, there were over 80 member organizations. The group founded a for-profit counterpart organization, Acxsys, in 1996, which launched additional Interac-branded services including e-transfers. Following several aborted merger attempts which were either blocked by the Competition Bureau or by some of the co-owners between 2008 and 2013, Interac and Acxsys were combined into a single for-profit organization, Interac Corporation, on 1 February 2018.[1][2] Interac's head office is located at Royal Bank Plaza in Toronto.

So uh, originally a non-profit co-operative thing, now a for-profit conglomerate mess? lol


There is presumably other providers for debit machines, cause some places in town here had workijng ones, but they are magnitudes smaller.

 

[EvilRoy]

So uh, originally a non-profit co-operative thing, now a for-profit conglomerate mess? lol


There is presumably other providers for debit machines, cause some places in town here had workijng ones, but they are magnitudes smaller.

I guess that explains why debit card use doesn't carry a fee, but sometimes e-transfers do. Honestly I kind of like the idea of it being one national system operated on a shared cost basis just for the purpose of standardization, just place it under government regulation and lock it in as a public service. Until Rogers goes down and fucks everything over again. I wonder if they could have dual ISPs for that stuff.

 

[sXeth]

I guess that explains why debit card use doesn't carry a fee, but sometimes e-transfers do. Honestly I kind of like the idea of it being one national system operated on a shared cost basis just for the purpose of standardization, just place it under government regulation and lock it in as a public service. Until Rogers goes down and fucks everything over again. I wonder if they could have dual ISPs for that stuff.

I mean, my work has 3 separate business lines (on 3 providers) to handle our stuff, IDK how Interac doesn't. Literally the only noticeable outage we had was when some bridge maintenance cut all 3 mainlines simultaneously.

 

[Kyrian007]

Loading Ready Run chimed in on the disaster.