TORONTO — Canadians waking up to a worldwide technology outage that disrupted airlines, hospitals and banks on Friday may be having flashbacks to a widespread telecom outage from two years ago.
The July 2022 outage of Rogers Communications Inc.’s networks lasted more than 24 hours and affected more than 12 million customers, while paralyzing communications across a number of sectors, including health care, law enforcement and the financial industry.
A report on the incident by Xona Partners Inc., which was delivered to the CRTC earlier this month, says that outage was caused by a configuration error during a network upgrade, prompting a flood of data to core network routers, which crashed.
Rogers has sought to strengthen the resiliency of its networks since the outage by separating the IP core for its wireless and wireline networks and improving the processes for change management and incident management.
The telecommunications company says its networks were unaffected by Friday’s global disruptions.
Experts have said both incidents serve as examples of the risks inherent to companies relying on common technology providers amid market consolidation.