Canadians across the country on Friday faced disruptions while accessing banking, police, 911, ATMs and internet services after Rogers Communications – one of Canada’s largest network service providers – faced technical difficulties.
People queued up outside coffee shops, public libraries and banks faced problems with cashless payment systems and ATMs. The company said that its technical teams were working to restore services.
Rogers is a major player in the sector and this is the second largest outage to hit the North American nation in 15 months. Rogers caters to 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers and controls 90% of the market share in Canada and is the leading service provider in Ontario.
Following the outage, Interac, an email money transfer service used by several Canadian banks, was affected. The Toronto-Dominion Bank said that it was facing system issues with Interac e-Transfer service. The Bank Of Montreal also reported that their services were affected and they faced difficulties in transaction processing while their customers were unable to dial the customer service.
The ATM and online banking services of the Royal Bank of Canada were also affected.
Canada’s industry minister François-Philippe Champagne and his team said they contacted the company.
“We expressed how important it is that this matter be resolved as soon as possible and for the company to provide prompt and clear communication directly to those impacted,’ the minister said via a tweet.
Police officials said that people were unable to reach emergency services via 911 calls in Toronto and Ottawa.
Downdetector, a website that tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed a surge in outage reporting from around 4:30am (local time) and by 7am (local time) more than 20,000 users complained that they were facing outages.
Several cafes, including Tim Hortons, were not accepting debit and credit cards and were forced to turn away customers who did not have cash. Many people also crowded Starbucks and other coffee shops which were using other network service providers not affected by the outage.
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