Timing. Everything happened last Friday. There is much to get to. Let me be among the last to talk about Rogers, Twitter and Elon Musk, and the Uber Files. There are things I won’t even get to, like Apple releasing the betas of iOS 16, and the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. But today, the Rogers debacle dominates.
Massive Rogers Outage Takes Down 1/3 of Canada For Better Part Of 24 Hours
As I’m sure everyone reading this is very aware of, last Friday Rogers suffered what can likely be described as the most significant outage from any Canadian Internet provider. At the time of this writing, Rogers has only said that the outage was caused by a maintenance update gone wrong.
The scale of the outage was massive. The entire Rogers internet infrastructure went down. Every Rogers customer was affected. No cellular service worked, no wired internet worked, no phone system worked. Any company that used Rogers as the provider of services was affected.
The list of companies affected is too long to list, and is probably an unknowable number anyway. Interac Debit transactions were unable to process. Any credit card terminal that used a rogers cellular connection didn’t work. Rogers phone customers, both cellular and wired, were unable to make calls, even to 911. Toronto’s Pearson Airport was brought to a near standstill. Passport offices were unable to process applications. The CRTC, amusingly, was also unable to accept calls, as their phone system uses Rogers. This is just a small sample of affected businesses and customers. In western Canada, where Rogers has no wireline internet or home phone presence, the impact was less, as it was limited primarily to services affected nationwide, and cellular connectivity issues.
One advantage of being among the last to write about this is that there is more information than there was last week. Rogers has pledged to proactively credit all customers with 5 days worth of credit on their next bill. On a 30 day billing cycle that works out to 16.7%. A Fido customer on a $50 monthly plan will see a roughly $8 credit, which does not seem like an equal to the potential loss of income and productivity. The first class action lawsuit has been filed, so that process will play out in the courts.
The Government of Canada has also been relatively quick to respond. The Government has directed the CRTC to investigate the outage and provide a public report on the cause. It is worth noting that as a publicly traded company Rogers will likely need to disclose it anyway, but here we are. The Government has also directed the wireless providers in Canada to come up with a plan within the next 60 days on how to avoid the kind of phone system outage in the future. The likely result of this will be that Rogers, Bell, and Telus will be required to allow phones from their competitors to access their towers and network in the event of an outage. Whether Telus and Bell would have had the network capacity to absorb roughly 1/3 of all cell phone connections in the country at once is another issue entirely, but the idea is a good one overall. This outage from Rogers is likely going to have a lasting impact on the telecom industry in Canada.
So… what actually happened? As has been said we don’t know. Rogers says it was due to a maintenance operation gone wrong, and has provided no other information. To end up with an outage at this scale the failures had to have been catastrophic. Cloudflare, a company that provides hosting and connectivity services across the internet, noted that the issue looks extremely similar to what took Meta’s (the artist formerly known as Facebook) entire suite of products down in 2021. That outage involved Meta accidentally removing certain routing information from it’s core network that essentially made it so the rest of the internet wasn’t able to connect to Meta’s networks. Cloudflare says that what happened to Rogers appears to be almost identical, with Rogers removing its connection information from core routers. This is something that should not be able to happen, and in Meta’s case, it was blamed on a series of events that were not anticipated to be possible. If the Rogers outage was indeed similar, it is likely a similarly unanticipated series of events occurred.
Outages happen. Unfortunately that is something we have to live with considering how connected everything we do is. But the scale of this one is huge, and will have a ripple effect in this country. This is not the last time we will be talking about it.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2022/07/09/rogers-ceo-outage-update-what-went-wrong/
https://mobilesyrup.com/2022/07/11/industry-minister-rogers-ceo-recent-outage/
Elon Musk Tries to Break Twitter Deal. Hilarity Ensues.
In a move absolutely no one saw coming, Elon Musk is trying to pull out of the deal to buy Twitter. Elon Musk telegraphed this for weeks, and finally made good on it. Twitter has sued Elon Musk to enforce the agreement. Elon keeps tweeting, which is the best part.
This is now in the hands of the lawyers the the courts.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/twitter-sues-elon-musk-1.6518560
Leaked Documents Show How Uber Broke Rules To Gain Marketshare
Over the weekend a massive data leak of communication and documentation from Uber between 2013 and 2017. The data is specific to the EU, and paints a very poor picture of the company as it attempted to penetrate the European market. It is understood that Uber encouraged illegal activities, and broke many laws in introducing service, and some of the documents and emails leaked as part of what is known as the Uber Files show just that.
Uber points out that the executive team has turned over entirely since that time period, and no one involved in those activities is with the company at this time. That may be true, and Uber is a different company today than it was a decade ago, but it still does not paint the company in a very positive light.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/uber-ride-hailing-ijic-1.6514563
How Ride Sharing Company Fail Those With Disabilities
An interesting read on how companies like Uber and Lyft do not accommodate for people with disabilities.
A good reminder that services like taxis, which do have requirements for part of their fleet to be able to accommodate people of all abilities, still have a place.
https://www.theverge.com/23199117/ride-sharing-disabled-passengers-accessibility-uber-lyft