Rogers customers report brief internet and television outage

Open this photo in gallery:

Thousands of Rogers Communications Inc. customers in Ontario briefly reported issues with their internet and television service on Thursday evening, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.ca.

Downdetector, which gathers data from multiple sources including social media and information submitted by users directly to its platform, showed more than 48,000 outage reports at 7:37 p.m. ET.

A Rogers spokesperson said the intermittent service interruption, which was caused by a technical issue, has been resolved.

“We sincerely apologize to our impacted customers for the service interruption,” Cam Gordon said in an e-mail.

Mr. Gordon said that the issue affected customers in parts of the Greater Toronto Area.

According to Downdetector, the service interruption impacted users in various parts of the province, including Toronto, Hamilton, Guelph, Kitchener, London, Barrie, Collingwood and Orillia.

In July of 2022, Rogers experienced a nationwide outage caused by a coding error that left millions of Canadians without cellphone, internet or home phone service for at least a day.

That outage prompted federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne to implement new rules requiring Canada’s telecoms to assist each other during network outages, provide customers with emergency roaming on their networks and follow a communications protocol to ensure consumers are not kept in the dark.

In April of 2021, Rogers suffered a nationwide wireless outage for roughly 16 hours that was caused by a software upgrade from its network partner Ericsson.

Last year, the CRTC started requiring Canada’s telecoms to report major service outages to the regulator within two hours of becoming aware of them. The requirement, which took effect on March 8, 2023, is in place on an interim basis pending the outcome of an ongoing regulatory proceeding on the matter.