Internet and cell phone were down yesterday

I'm sure everyone in Canada knows about this.. Rogers cable internet and cell phone service were both out all day yesterday knocking out service of both for many millions of Canadians and anyone else relying on their networking like banks, ATMs, businesses, etc.

Thing I don't understand is how cable internet and cell phone service could be linked in any way except being run/owned by the same company. Perhaps someone with greater networking knowledge than I could explain what both of those services could share that would bring both of them down at the same time.

I've asked in other Rogers related forums and googled away but no one has been able to say anything more than they both share the same network.

I'd like to know how they share the same network. My cable internet comes in on the decades old copper in my bldg via cables that were installed across the city a long time ago and my cell phone, of course, is transmitted/received by towers that were installed much more recently.

I find it difficult to imagine where, along the line, they are mingled together before they're sent on their merry way to my modem and my cell phone.

https://www.blogto.com/tech/2022/07/...ternet-outage/

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r33446262-

I read it was a known software glitch that affected more than just Rogers.....

If the cell towers can confirm you're a paid user by checking your account, it can't let you communicate. (my guess)

A few years ago, CenturyLink pushed out an untested "update" to all of their data centers nationwide. It took down their entire network, and even their techs could not get in to fix it.

These days, there is really no such thing as POTS or cable TV. Everything goes through the same Ethernet connections and routers.

The Robbers I mean Rogers company is saying it was a software update gone wrong causing cascading router failures throughout their country wide infrastructure. One after another failed causing the next one that was rerouted to to get overloaded and on and on until the whole network shut down.

Many people are, of course, upset and Rogers is saying they'll be compensated for the downtime which in Rogers speak means 1/30th of a months payment which would be around a couple of dollars to most people which of course is a joke especially to businesses that lost a lot of money because they couldn't operate without debit and credit machines etc. And people who couldn't call 911 for emergencies or work from home without internet and phones. Cancelled Zoom meetings... all kinds of modern things that were shut down for the entire day and in some cases in smaller towns and isolated areas still not up and running after 48 hours.

This sums much of it up nicely:

Quote:

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Rogers outage leads to questions about compensation and competition as service rumbles back to life

Fury continues to be aimed at the telecom company while CEO Tony Staffieri blamed “a network system failure.”

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https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/202...k-to-life.html

This is the way of the World... Who needs "nukes" when you can cripple a city/state/country with a few mouse clicks.

As usual the crazies are blaming it on everyone from North Korea to Bill Gates to Hillary Clinton and the crooks are sending out fake refund phishing texts to lots of people.

Note: Rogers does not send texts to anyone. Ever.

Your ~$2.00 refund will automatically be deducted from your next Rogers invoice.
Don't spend it all in one place.

I spoke with a neighbor of mine who's worked for Rogers for around ten years. He's a network specialist. He could not tell me what actually happened because he said no one actually oversees their overall network and no one he knows or works with actually has a real explanation. Each branch or division looks after their own part of the network and that's broken down into many divisions, most of which have little to no communication with each other. He said they work on their part of the network on what they see in real time and perform duties to keep their own little part of it running.

They don't let each other know when they're going to update software for example so that's only known if something stops working. Like it did the other day. I asked him specifically if there was anyone or any group in the company that actually oversees their network to make sure it's all working properly and he said no... the groups only contact each other if something breaks to try and fix it.

He also said that there are breakdowns similar to what happened every week or more often but this last one was unusual because they usually only last a few minutes or perhaps a few hours in a smaller location.. not country wide.

He did tell me that the reason that both mobile/wireless and cable internet went down is both systems rely on TCP/IP.


And as I predicted the tiny, pathetic compensation Rogers is offering for the downtime is really upsetting everyone who dealt with it.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada...ionwide-outage

CenturyLink was down for several days with their outage. No compensation. It sounds like yours was similar but shorter.

Most IT departments these days operate on the zero communication method. No one ever tells anyone else what they are doing. Zoom meetings - what are those?

Rogers is getting so much flack they're now offering 5 day's credit to each customer. That's probably reasonable for anyone who was just inconvenienced in a minor way like just missing some TV or a few unimportant emails or watching Youtube music or cat videos but there were many people and businesses who lost work and customers and a lot of money that ~$20 dollars is a joke. Lots of discussion about class action suites.

https://www.thestar.com/business/202...ake-a-hit.html

The federal gov't is saying they're going to try and force the different major service providers to work to back each other's wireless service up in the future during such emergencies but I don't see how that's realistically going to work.

The Thought Plickens:

Quote:

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Hacker claims to have hacked into Rogers days before outage out of good faith

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https://cybernews.com/security/hacke...of-good-faith/

CenturyLink was down for several days with their outage. No compensation. It sounds like yours was similar but shorter.