On Friday July 8th, the Rogers network shut down for a full day. From 4am to 11pm there was no internet, no Wi-Fi, no cell service, and no interact transactions that involved Rogers. Anything that was connected to the company went on blackout mode ALL DAY. Now, with so many questions surrounding the situation many can’t help but wonder what could have happened to destroy the internet for a full day. Did someone pull out the cable and couldn’t plug it back in or was there something that needed to be covered up? Was something sketchy happening behind the scenes or was it just a coding problem that took a full day to fix?
The Rogers CEO Tony Staffiere told Global News that “a maintenance upgrade in our core network, and that caused our routers to malfunction.” As a result, the “routers erroneously flooded the network with traffic.” They had 100’s and 1000’s of people trying to fix it from all around the world. That is a really vague explanation we must say. What is either really weird or a crazy coincidence is that there was another outage less than a year ago. What is even spookier? Both blackouts occurred Fridays and the last one even caused Rogers’ CEO to step down. The previous slip into ancient times occured October 22, 2021. Considering the company has so much influence in Canada and close to a monopoly on the market, we think it can’t afford to have such mass outages.
Now let’s think on what the hypothesize on potential conspiracy theories as to what happened this last outage. First alleged theory, the Russians; of course. With the situation in Ukraine one could easily draw a connection between the Russian Government (Putin), and higher ups at Rogers. But, why would this interest the Russians? Banks weren’t the only major industry down, 911 was actually shut down as well due to it working through Rogers. Could perhaps the shut down be a way to let a piece of news or perhaps a report go under the radar? One can’t help but wonder considering how close our American neighbors are. Of course, this is all alleged and a complete hypothesis; however, it doesn’t make it any less curious.
Alongside the same train of thought. What if someone wanted to show the Canadian government just how vulnerable our top communication network really is? With Rogers being down, more than half the country experienced total blackout. Perhaps a Canadian vigilante wanted to point out the dangerous nature of having only two major telecommunications company in a country. What better way to show the government flaws in the system than to show them how fragile it is? It is definitely worth thinking about this theory as it is incredibly valid. If there was a larger variety of networks, an outage such as this one would have not been as damaging. Although only a theory we are sure that officials learnt just how fragile our systems are, specially emergency services like 911.
Lastly, what if Bell infiltrated Rogers and caused this to try to pull more customers? You see, early 2022 Rogers was named the top telecommunications company with Bell coming a close second. In fact, Rogers in 2019 had over 10.84 million subscribers while Bell counted with 9.8 million. With 2 power outages in less than a year, there is no more compelling situation to convert Rogers Clients into Bell customers allegedly. In fact, in a tweet from the Bell Support Twitter account, the telecom said some of its customers “may be experiencing issues when trying to call or text Rogers subscribers due to current interruptions in Rogers network services.” and added;
“The Bell network is operational and calls and texts between Bell customers or to other providers are not impacted,”.
OUCH! no better way to convert people than to remind them what their neighbor is enjoying and they can’t thanks to Rogers. Although just a theory, we think it holds a lot of merit considering how many people swapped providers during, immediately after, and even now.
What do you, the community think? Do you think what Tony said was true or do you think something shady might have happened behind the scenes that was covered up or not seen because of the network outage? Could it just be a smaller fish trying to eat the larger one? Let us know in the comments what you think.
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