Rogers CEO says maintenance update responsible for Canada-wide outage Transcript

Talia Ricci: (00:01) There were more people on patios enjoying the weather and fewer desperately seeking an internet connection this weekend. But Friday's outage is still on people's minds. Speaker 2: (00:10) You get a little peeved off that with these monopolies that we're having here, you'd expect better service. Speaker 3: (00:18) It was actually really frustrating. Everything was really slow. Talia Ricci: (00:22) The CEO of Rogers has since apologized for a lengthy network outage that affected customers across the country, saying in a statement, "We now believe we've narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning." Ritesh Kotak: (00:40) A major update within the backbone of Rogers essentially went horribly wrong and shut down the entire system. Talia Ricci: (00:48) The widespread disruption halted communications across a number of sectors, including healthcare, law enforcement and the financial industry. Now, a response from the federal government. "On Monday, the Minister of Innovation will be meeting with the CEOs of Rogers and other major telecom companies." But some are calling for an inquiry by the CRTC. John Lawford: (01:08) They can get documents that the public can't get and they can produce a report with recommendations to Rogers on what to fix. Talia Ricci: (01:16) The CRTC says it's looking into what happened and will put measures in place to better protect Canadians in the future, but didn't specify what those measures would be. Richard Leblanc: (01:25) It could have been much worse. In fact, it could have been catastrophic. Talia Ricci: (01:28) This professor says Canada dodged a bullet, and this has exposed how vulnerable the country is. Richard Leblanc: (01:34) A standard maintenance rollout should not result in the paralysis of a quarter of Canadian's ability to communicate. I think there's going to be several class action lawsuits. Talia Ricci: (01:46) While being disconnected for a day brought some people peace- Speaker 8: (01:49) We did our life about without the internet. Talia Ricci: (01:53) ... many say an apology is not enough. Joe Mercurio: (01:55) What I want to read is someone from Rogers is taking responsibility for this and X, Y, and Z will happen. Talia Ricci: (02:04) Rogers said customers that were impacted will receive a credit, and that will happen automatically. However, the company hasn't specified how much or when customers can expect to see it. Talia Ricci: (02:15) Talia Ricci, CBC News, Toronto.